The Last Survivor
by Kodiak Bear Country
Summary: I had lived alone for as long as I remember. Also known as the story where Sheppard and McKay crash, get hurt and need help, and the wraith are afoot.
1. Chapter 1

Title: The Last SurvivorAuthor: Kodiak bear  
Category: Gen  
Status: WIP (2/3rds written)  
Characters: McKay, Sheppard, later team and Beckett, told from an OC POV.  
Warnings: None  
Summary: _I had lived alone for as long as I remember._  
AN: takes place after episode 3x03 and before 3x04; thanks to Linzi and sholio for their wonderful beta help, all remaining mistakes are mine. Written for the Sheppard H/C challenge, prompt – elemental.

**The Last Survivor**

The cold had returned.

A chill had taken hold of the air, and held now, even when the sun ruled the sky. In defiance of the cold, I wore my boots of tanned gnarl hide, even though I had draped my fur cloak around my shoulders before I had left my home. I knew the snow was threatening to come, and when it did, it would blanket the floor. Only my clothes made of fur would keep my body warm from the damaging bite.

"Time enough," I spoke to the sky.

Time enough for me to finish my walk, collect more laviola and gilly. Maybe the last I would gather in cycles to come.

A sharp cry of a fen startled me, made my feet slow. Birds would chatter and talk, but those were in the days of warmth, not of cold. It was a late fen, and surprised by something. My hand stole to the satchel I wore over one shoulder, seeking reassurance even though there was nothing there except the herbs I'd gathered already, and my flask of laviola water.

The night predators would sometimes leave their beds during the sun sky, driven by hunger, especially this close to the time of cold, when all beasts great and small were trying to store food for the long, dark cycles ahead.

I stood as still as a tree and waited. Then, my ears captured the struggles of some beast through the woods ahead. A soft, angry cry, full of pain and frustration. It did not sound of a night predator, and it did not sound like a gnarl, or a Fen, or any other of the myriad beasts I knew.

It sounded like me.

Or, like one of my kind.

Suddenly, my feet sprinted towards the sound, my pale hair flailing behind me as I left care behind.

My kind, could it be?

I ran by adder, birch and maple tree, hopped logs felled by age and storm, the soft hide of my boots crushing the dry, fragile leaves of many colors that had fallen from their home.

When I came out of a thickly wooded place, I found a small clearing, a gnarl's den by the beaten grass and weeds, but there was no gnarl. Instead, two bodies -- two _males_ – lay on the ground.

To see others like me, to have the proof before me that I was not the last of my kind – I trembled, even as I stood frozen.

I had lived alone for as long as I remember.

My memories, they were like mist, and they often left the taste of fear in my mouth and pictures of white-haired monsters in my mind. I heard terrible screams in the night, and saw great fires, tasted smoke on my tongue. I had known something horrible had happened, but what it was, it hovered away from me. At night when I tried to sleep, and the dreams would come, I would think, maybe I didn't want to remember.

Now, I had these two before me, and I almost did not recognize my own kind, so long had it been. Two full-growns, wounded, like the forest animals I so often treated and nursed back to health. One had flat hair, the color of dark fallen leaves. He lay on his back, his hand still clutched in the shirt of the other. His clothes were torn in places, dirty and burnt. The other, with hair the color of the night sky, was on his side, as if he'd fallen. His clothes were similar to the flat-haired one, and just as tattered.

How had they come to be here?

The eyes of one opened, and they traveled up the length of my bare legs, past the browning vine around my waist that kept the loose cloth from bagging at my middle, up over the natural rise on my chest before coming to rest on my face. He had eyes the color of the sky. "Who—help…" then his eyes fluttered shut.

Help.

I had known the word once. It was far away, and rusty, but I knew I would help.

They needed to be brought back to my home and I did not think I was strong enough to carry them. It was not the first time I was presented with a weight too much for me, and like before, I fashioned a litter from sturdy birch branches. I used thick vines to hold it together, and pine boughs that would cushion their bodies against the jarring ride to my home. They were fortunate, as was I, because in another week the vines would wither and die, and I would not have been able to fashion the travois on which to drag them to safety.

As it was, I could only move one at a time, but both were wounded. The dark haired one breathed roughly and blood seeped sluggishly from more than one cut on his head and matted in his hair. The other bled from a wound in his leg, and burned with fever. Why was the dark haired one asleep? What had injured the sky eyes?

The sky was darkening, and I knew I must get them both to the warmth of my home. I bandaged the sky eyes quickly using strips torn from the hem of my clothing. I had more than one, and this was wearing thin. I would not suffer for its loss.

I was thankful that I often carried the flask of laviola water, made from a flower that only grew at the end of the warm cycles. It eased fever along with providing strength. The nutty flavor was one I had grown fond of, and I took it with me on my walks so that I could range farther. Now, I tipped the liquid against sky eyes' pale lips, relieved when he responded enough to drink.

I did not know what to do for the dark haired male, but his breathing worried me. The bleeding was slow enough that I knew he was not in danger of dying from loss of blood, but still I hesitated to leave him behind for fear that when I returned his breathing would have stopped. But the sky eyes needed a bed, and stitching, and I did not think it made sense to treat the unknown over the known.

The trip to my home was not an easy one. Not for me, and not for sky eyes. The forest floor was not smooth, especially with the leaves thick under my feet. I had to twist between fat tree trunks, a patchwork of bone-colored lichen growing up from their roots. Sometimes I went across as much as I went forward. He woke frequently, but only mumbled before falling back into the delirium he seemed lost in. I heard names and words that meant nothing to me. Ship, Sheppard, Wraith, storm – but he used one I did know. Help, repeatedly. I soothed him with meaningless whispers.

When I pulled the litter to my weathered wooden door, dragged it over the threshold, and into the large room that served as everything for me, I realized I would need to prepare another straw mattress. I did not have two beds, or even three, but the one I did have was a large pallet set low to the ground, near my hearth. I had moved it from the outer wall not more than a moon cycle ago to stay warm.

The world was a cold world, more than it was warm, and the time of the snows came frequently and lasted for many moon cycles. Sky eyes blinked towards the ceiling, then turned his head to watch as I pulled the blankets down and smoothed the clean sheet into place.

"Sheppard!"

He was agitated. "Is he the dark haired one?" I asked softly. The bed was ready, and I moved towards sky eyes' legs, pulling them gently off the litter. He understood my intent, and weakly moved with me.

The groans were wrought from the pain in his leg and maybe his body in general. I could see the filmy promise of bruising underneath his skin in the shadowed fire light of the room.

"Oh, God, that hurts. Yes, yes – lots of dark hair, where…"

He rapidly scanned my home – the one room was circular, the ceiling no higher than the tallest of these males I had found. The fire burned in the center pit I had dug deep down. Most of the smoke was drawn upward and out through the topped slits I had provided in the roof, but what remained sometimes burned my eyes.

I was proud of what I had built and labored over, creating luxuries such as dishes to eat from. I had fashioned bowls from wood, made shelves from deadfall in the woods. My sheets, clothing, blankets, books -- I'd scavenged them from what I was sure had once been the village of my people, and now it had turned to dust in the emptiness.

I could have lived there, taken more, but the ghosts chased me away. I had taken only that which I could not make on my own, and never returned.

Agitation swirled over sky eyes. "I am going for him," I promised gently, "but first I must bind your leg." I gestured at the make-do strips of my tunic that were becoming saturated with his life's blood. "I have a poultice that will help."

When I turned from gathering the pottery jar from the shelf, his eyes had closed, and I knew he'd returned to his fitful rest. I grabbed the basket with bandages I made from river moss. It grew thick and plentiful, and strong enough to be woven into patches, or it could be pushed into a deep wound in freshly picked clumps. It would absorb sickness from a wound, draw it from the body. Combined with the poultice of gilly and jassim, I was confident the fever would soon be chased from sky eyes. Even now, the light touch against his cheek let me know his body was responding.

I worked quickly, thankful he was unaware. The sinew I harvested from animals that died in my care would hold sky eyes' wound together.

In the back of my mind, the image of the dark haired one burned restlessly. When I finished, it had only been moments, and I pulled the blanket to his chest, touched his brow lightly and whispered, "Do not leave. I will return with your friend."

The litter was light, and the return trip to the dark haired one was easy. A soft snow had begun, and I found him shivering in his bloodied clothing. His breathing was unchanged, and I was relieved he had not passed into the otherworld while I was away helping sky eyes. "You must be strong," I told him.

He startled me with a groan.

I waited, breathless, but he did not move, and the groan died away into the harsh breaths he pulled from the icy air. It was not good for him. With as much care as I could, I levered, tugged, and managed to get him settled on the litter. I fought against the urge to examine him for wounds because the cold was now descending in fat flakes.

I trudged the path in silence, only hearing the man's continued struggle for life behind me.

When I opened the door to my home, warm air rushed out, and I hurriedly pulled the litter in. Sky eyes was where I had left him. After I cared for the dark haired one, I would work on a new bed for myself, but the one I had was large enough for the two males to rest and recover on.

Moving the dark haired one was not any easier than sky eyes, and I found myself sweating easily under the simple brown tunic I wore. I shook off the fur cloak I had made from a mother gnarl that had died of old age. I had found her clinging to life by the water, and did what she let me do to ease her passing. Then I thanked her for her gift of food and fur.

Once I had him free of the litter, I dragged it outside and leaned it against the cliff wall, then returned to him.

"You are heavy," I scolded the dark haired one. His appearance was deceptive. I had thought he would be easier to move than sky eyes, but instead, he proved to be just as difficult, with his long legs and arms, and being deeply asleep.

Why was I helping these males?

What if they were dangerous? What if they were like the white haired monsters in my dreams?

For a moment, I rashly thought it did not matter. I had lived so long alone that it seemed maybe I would welcome the end. I was tired of talking to the animals just so I could hear something other than the birds and insects around me.

Besides, these two were nothing like the white haired monsters. Their hair was short, richly colored. Their skin, even in the pallor of injury, carried a color similar to mine. And they were in no condition to be a danger towards me.

The dark haired one needed much care. I had to undress him with a touch as soft as the one I used with newborn hatchlings. My fear that he had broken one of the thin bones that spanned his air cavity proved to be true. Had it punctured the cavity, or was the ragged breathing from the pain? Some damage to the air cavities resolved without treatment. I had cared for creatures injured in fights with others of their kind, and only when it became clear death was near would I try to help by opening up the animal. Sometimes, it was too late. Other times, I could relieve fluid or air around the cavity, and the breathing resumed with ease and my only worry was keeping away the blood sickness after I had stitched together the cut I had made.

But this one also had many cuts on his head and face. I used the remaining sinew and had to focus only on the ones I worried would not heal without the benefit of being stitched.

After I finished, I moved around to sky eyes. His fever was returning, and I dribbled more laviola between his lips. The bandage on his leg needed to be changed, so soon. Now that I had the dark haired one cared for, I focused on removing sky eyes' clothing and I worked between both men, washing them with warm water spiced with more gilly.

Throughout, both men remained deeply asleep. Sky eyes had settled better after I had tucked the dark haired one by his side. Were they litter mates?

If they lived, they could tell me much.

Satisfied that I had done what I could, I stretched my aching muscles and walked around to the other side of the central hearth. There I lifted the heavy iron kettle, another haunted remnant from the village of my people. I carried it to the door. I had meant to fill my water flasks after my walk, but finding the males had changed my plans and now I would make do with the fresh fallen snow.

Cold gusts blew wet flakes inside while I struggled to lift the kettle over the threshold. The air was still warm enough that the snow was sticky and moist, heavier. I knew it would soon become drier, the flakes smaller, and the wind would push it into tall drifts. There were snows that had buried my entire home. The thought pulled my gaze towards the shelves opposite the door, where my harvest had been stored over the cycles of warmth.

It had been enough for me. It would not be enough for three.

Worry about each day as its own. The males may not survive the night, or the next day, and even if they did, two males could help me find more food. Surely there would be a way to make it through the cycles of cold that stretched ahead.

I scooped enough snow to fill the kettle, then dragged it back, pulling it over the log that I used to keep out snow. I shut the door, and turned, hefting it up enough to not gouge the hard packed dirt floor. The room had grown more shadowed as the gray light released the sky to the dark gray of night. The snow clouds did not give off the same brightness as a full moon, nor even half the moon, but the fire was bright enough and I shivered inside my clothes, thankful for the warmth. The cold could not sneak in past the dried mud bricks I had formed so carefully.

I melted the snow over the fire, and scooped it into the flasks, then used the remaining water to mix with ground bear root, making a thick broth that would stick to the bones in cold weather like this. I tried to rouse the males to eat, even a little, but only sky eyes responded enough to take a few mouthfuls before he drifted away again. The dark haired one slept so deep I feared he would not find his way up.

I ate a small bowlful, then used the pebbles and sand to scour them clean. My straw brush swept out the last bits, and I put the bowls away for tomorrow. The brush needed fixing, so I took it and the birch basket of straw to sit by the fire. I listened to the wind howl above, and shivered again.

With nimble fingers, I pulled the root thread apart, and tossed the broken straw into the fire. I gathered fresh straw and bundled it together, wrapping the root around till the bundle was secure on the branch. Then, using my knee, I pushed it flat and began to sew halfway down with what was left of my root thread, in and out. This method kept the straw in the slightly flared position. I had found the shape to be the most helpful in cleaning away dust and dirt.

I had more birch bowls of root to split and roll into new thread, but that would be for tomorrow.

My body told me it was late. The effort in dragging the males to my home had made me even more tired than usual, and I remembered I still had a mattress to prepare. Taking one of the precious sheets from a shelf, I folded it in half and began stitching the edges together with real thread. I used it sparingly, and only with the cloth I had scavenged and could not replace. It was the only use for such a rare supply.

Once I had all but the width at the top sewn together, I grabbed handfuls of straw from the pile against the wall where the wood for my fires was also stacked. I kept a large supply for animals, kindling, repairing bricks. Every last cycle of warmth, I cut large bundles and replenished my pile.

Still, I did not pad the mattress as thickly as I had my other, because this was only the beginning of the cold. I had a separate storage building where more straw cured, along with more wood and food, but that straw would not be ready for another cycle.

I pushed it close to the fire, checking to make sure the hearth of river rock was producing enough heat for the night. Not all rock would do as the river rock did. When exposed to fire, it absorbed heat, then radiated it outward for hours, heating my home. I had discovered it by accident. Cycles ago I had been out late, and once the day sky has been replaced by the night sky, it was not safe to travel the woods. It was the time between warmth and cold, where the days were still comfortable, but the nights were not. I built a fire, and used river rock to keep the flame from leaving.

When I woke, I was still warm. The river rock radiated heat, though the fire had burned out during the night.

My thoughts returned to the present, and I hunched over the males one last time to see if they were well. Sky eyes needed a new bandage. The dark haired one felt warm, and he continued to be so deeply asleep that he did not respond, even when I rubbed a fist across his upper chest, far away from the broken bone, trying to get a reaction.

I went to my bed troubled.

Why should it matter to me if these two did not live? I had been alone for many cycles before – I could continue to do so. They would either live, or they would not.

Still, rest did not come to me.

"Rodney!"

I bolted from my pallet, the blanket I had wrapped around me falling to my feet. Quickly, I waited for my eyes to adjust to the muted green glow from the walls. Someone had shouted – one of the males, but which, and why? And what had he said?

When I could see enough, I crept to the pallet, and knelt. Sky eyes was stirring, soaked under the sheet. His fever had broken. Had it been him? Then, the dark haired one threw an arm to the side, almost hitting me and sky eyes. "Down!"

I was already, but I threw myself farther down, and stared at him, bewildered. "What is it?"

He mumbled and pulled his hand back, resting it carelessly against his belly. I frowned, and reached for his brow, feeling the heat before my skin touched against his. A fever had risen hard and fast in him, even while the fever had broken in the other.

Was it from one of the cuts on his head? It would be difficult to use the poultice and moss on so many places, and with his hair in the way.

I considered the male then turned to my shelf. I took one of the older sheets that I had not used because of its condition. The river moss bandages were getting low, but it would need to do. The pottery jar with the poultice mix was next, then I set to work rubbing the mix in his hair, over each cut I could reach. Then the moss, and finally, I wrapped it firmly in place, using the broad strips I had torn from the threadbare sheet. It was messy, but I did not know what else to do.

I dribbled laviola between his lips as I had done with sky eyes.

My legs ached from kneeling on the hard ground, and when I pushed away to stand, I realized two eyes of blue were watching me. "He is ill." I do not know what made me say the obvious, to this one who knew much, I could tell, but sky eyes was not drifting in fever, or fear. He was truly awake and aware, and suddenly I felt very awkward.

"No life signs on the planet, and yet, here you are."

I could not tell if he was pleased or angry.

He shifted. "What is this – straw? Poking every inch of me – but note, that is every thankful inch. Still," his lips drew tight, "Another space gate we can't harvest. At this rate, we'll finish the damn thing posthumously."

Though I knew his voice was weak, I was relieved that he was talking. It was a good sign for his recovery. But the words he used -- I tried to follow. Life signs, space gate…harvest? "You harvest gates?" What was a gate? Surely he did not mean the ones I used to keep my animals from leaving while they recovered. One did not harvest a gate – food was harvested. And space was empty but for the lights, did he mean to say that those lights meant others lived above and around me? That all this time I was surrounded by others like me, and these males? "Did you come from the lights in the night sky?"

Sky eyes stopped muttering…I had not realized he had continued while I struggled to understand. From the creasing of his forehead, I could tell he was in pain. He seemed to stare more at my home, the fire, the dark haired one and then his leg. "Yes, yes. We come from a place far, far away, a little light in your night sky." He was looking again at the dark haired one, the bandages and then back to his leg before returning his eyes to me. "It feels better – did you do that? Really, it feels a lot better. Carson would have kitties to see what you're using. "

Had I done something wrong? Maybe I should have left these males in the woods. I backed further away. "You were both injured, and you asked for help."

I would not have helped if he had not asked.

The false thought made me angry at myself. I would have helped them, whether sky eyes had asked or not. They were the first of my kind I had seen in so very, very long. I had often thought I was the only one left in all the day and night sky.

"Of course I asked for help! Something in this atmosphere made our…" he looked at me thoughtfully, "space ship…break…crap, I hate explaining technology to primitives. We crashed, fell very far from the sky, Sheppard tried to get a signal out but there were…" sky eyes drifted quiet, but then his eyes widened, and he tried to sit up, crying out, "Wraith! Oh, God, we've got to get out of here! We detected wraith life signs on the planet, their ship must have been affected like ours and --"

"Wraith?"

His eyes narrowed, the pain of his sudden movements tamping his outburst. "Ugly life sucking monsters, white hair to here," he raised a hand to his shoulder, "and very hard to kill." Something he said made him look around with renewed intensity. "Where's our stuff? No no no…we need guns! What'd you do with the things we had with us?"

I had stopped listening after he described these wraith. Could they be the same white haired monsters from my dreams? Had they come back after all these cycles? I shrunk within my tunic.

"Think, Rodney – Sheppard will know what to do. How is he? Is he okay?"

My eyes were scrunched shut. I heard terrible wailing in the smoke-filled night. The whine of bright light rained down on us from the darkened sky. White cones of light scooped people away in the blink of an eye. Screams, awful screams. Fear gripped me now as it had then.

_Do not leave, Mawani. I am going to help your father. You must stay hidden!_

Mawani. Was it my name? I had never remembered so much, and the vividness made me taste salt on my lips.

"What'd I say?" Sky eyes looked at me, confused. "Oh, God, he's going to die, isn't he?"

"I do not know," I answered truthfully. I tried to banish those memories away. If the white haired ones were back then maybe they had finally learned I had escaped and had returned to take me, as well. The terror was hard to control. My home that had felt so warm and safe, now felt confining and vulnerable.

I tried to focus on sky eyes. His eyes were growing pain-filled. "The dark haired one suffered many injuries to his head." I pointed at my head then my chest. "He has a broken bone across his air cavity and should not move."

"Our stuff, then? Where is it? Please tell me you didn't leave all of it?"

"I found only you." If there had been more with them, I would have brought it.

He was tiring and slumped back into the straw, making a face when he did so. "Fine. I should've known better anyway, this is me after all. If it wasn't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all. Just – I need to talk to your leader." He looked expectantly at me.

"My…leader?" I had speech much the same as sky eyes, but even though I could bring to my mind the word, and speak it on my tongue, I did not always understand the meaning. What was a leader?

Sky eyes widened his eyes again, but this time I felt it was because this male was annoyed further with me. "Yes, the one that makes all the decisions for your primitive happy little band?"

I had been alone for many cycles and suddenly wished to be alone again. "I do not have a band, and I make decisions for myself." I glared at his pale face.

His eyes rolled and I thought at first he was having some kind of fit, but then he spoke again. "So you lead yourself, congratulations. Now, where's mommy and daddy, and anyone else older than you?"

Maybe these odd facial expressions and strange demands were from how ill he had been? Maybe sky eyes had become confused inside his mind? I had seen animals recover from injuries and never act normal again. Some would lack the sense to even eat and drink, they just drifted along, and if I had not cared for them, they would have starved or drowned by walking into water and not swimming to safety. Usually, those were the little animals. The fragile ones. "There are no others, sky eyes," I said kindly. If he was suffering from a damaged mind, I should not be harsh.

Tiredness washed over me. During our talk, I had relaxed to sit beside sky eyes. My knees and legs were folded under the hem of my tunic. The silence of early morning told me the storm had blown away. If these white haired monsters were out there, it would be hard, cold travel and I did not think they would find my home. I was clever. It was built among an outcropping of large clay cliffs, made with the same material.

I had learned from my animals that safety lay in blending with those things around you. The creatures that roamed the woods at night were large enough to kill me, but they never saw my home. I was always safe here.

I saw something pass over his eyes. "No others?" He twisted his head to look around again, then back to the dark haired one. His face looked worried. "You're all alone down here?"

"I have been alone for as long as I remember." I made myself stand, biting my lip against the ache in my legs. The dark haired one was growing restless again. I brought the flask with laviola to sky eyes. "Drink, just a little," I instructed gently.

He took the flask, wincing from the pain. I frowned, and pulled the sheet down, noticing the shivers. I should rebuild the fire.

"Hey! No, uh, what're you doing?"

I pushed against the darkening spot on his side. He yelped. "I do not think it is broken," I said, pulling the sheet back to his chest. Sky eyes was gripping the flask, sweat beading on his forehead. The damage was on the surface, in his skin and muscles, but it would hurt a lot. "Drink, it will keep the fever away. I will get you fresh gilly for the pain."

"Fever and pain, okay…no citrus, right? Because I'm deathly allergic."

Allergic?

"I have given you both medicines before," I said, unsure of his meaning.

The dark haired one muttered, his restless motions suddenly rising to the panicked shout, "Going down!" His hand flung out again, almost knocking the flask from sky eyes' hand.

Sky eyes caught the dark haired one's hand, and held on. "Sheppard – it's okay. You got us down safe." The forehead smoothed and the dark haired one quieted. Sky eyes exhaled and pulled his hand back. He looked worried but then he uncorked the flask, and tipped it to his lips. After he drank a little, he handed it back to me. "Pain medicine now would be good." His eyes focused on the door. "Are we safe here? Because I'd really hate to survive the crash only to get sucked dry from a wraith."

"If we are not safe here, there is no better place."

It was not the answer sky eyes wished for, but it was all I could offer.

"Oh, that's reassuring," he said in a way that made me certain it was not.

I padded softly to the shelf where the distilled gilly was, pulling the jar down, and taking the small bamboo reed that was next to it. I returned just as softly to sky eyes. My home was large, the natural curves of the wall had been difficult to sculpt, and though it was not high, it was wide, leaving much room for all the things I needed near during the long cycles of cold. He had watched me as I retrieved the supplies. His eyes slipped to the reed. "What's that for? You don't, I mean, you aren't going to put that in my arm or anything, are you? Because I might complain about an IV needle, but this is ridiculous."

In his arm? I laughed, I could not help myself. How silly was sky eyes.

"What," he demanded. "Didn't anyone tell you it's not nice to laugh at guests?"

"No, sky eyes, no one told me." I still smiled. "It is to go in your mouth." I pantomimed drawing a few drops from the jar, then letting them drop into my mouth. "Two drops takes the pain of a gnarl away. Four drops and a gnarl will never wake again." It was the gift I could give to the ones injured beyond my ability to heal. The ones that were suffering great pain.

"Uh…how big is this…gnarl?"

"A little larger than you." I pulled free the honeycomb stopper. The honey served to sweeten the bitterness. I had used the gilly myself before, when I had been bitten badly by a desperate gnarl, injured and crazed. Pulling enough for two drops, I pushed my thumb at the end of the reed, and told sky eyes, "Open."

He pushed his hands against the straw mattress, running his palms worriedly against the sheet. "Actually, I think I'm good. It doesn't hurt --"

I thrust the reed over his mouth and released the drops so quickly he almost choked, but it went down. I cared for enough reluctant animals that this male was not difficult to manage. "Now, you will rest, and I will help the dark haired one before I will get some rest myself. "

The draught of gilly whisked sky eyes into sleep, whether he wished it or not. Free from the tiring talk – trying to keep up with the strange conversation with sky eyes was hard – I focused anew on the dark haired one. Sky eyes had managed to ease his male companion, but I worried about the ragged breathing and the warm skin.

I dosed him with a little more laviola, listened to his chest. If the air cavity had been breached by the broken bone, it was not worsening. I would need to keep him as still as possible, though. I decided to ease his restlessness with some gilly as well, but only one drop. Two might suppress his already shallow breathing too much.

I stood, still tired. My mattress was inviting. First, I rekindled the fire, not high, but enough to begin reheating the river rocks. Then I stretched out under my blanket, and stared at the dimming glow from the wall. The clay absorbed the light from the day sky, and lit the night with green. It was not bright; soft and muted, and if I woke at night, it sometimes would take moments for my eyes to adjust to the scant light in order to see.

Jade Cliffs.

Where I had built my home, the area, it was called the Jade Cliffs. With my house nestled against the natural rise of the cliff walls, the wraith would not be able to find it.

I clenched my fingers in a fist, felt my nails bite into the skin on my palm. My eyes did not want to shut, but I forced them. The smell of smoke assailed me. The screams. My eyes opened.

oOo

Sleep was elusive, and I rose from my bed along with the sun rising in the sky. Or, at least, the light from the day sky. It filtered through the slits in the roof, casting the room in a pale representation of the warm images caused by the earlier firelight. I glanced at the males; both still slept. I walked softly to their side, the dirt floor chilly beneath my bare feet, and knelt to check the dark haired one first, relieved to feel the dampness of his fever having left in the early morning hours. When I ran my knuckles on the bone below his throat, he responded by moving his hand weakly towards the irritation. Good.

Sky eyes was breathing better, the gilly draught still easing his pain even hours later. I needed to retrieve more river moss, water, and I wanted to look for this wraith – to see if they were the white haired monsters in my dreams.

I gathered my fur cloak from the knotty log hook near the door, and slipped it over my shoulders, along with my gathering pouch and a birch bowl for the moss. When I pulled the door open, the ivy vines squeaked. Water had gathered on the outside where wind-blown snow had collected and the heat from inside caused it to melt. I looked over my shoulder, worried the noise had woken either male, but both continued to sleep, unaware.

I stepped out into air so cold it drove the breath from my lungs. The clouds still hung fat and gray overhead, promising more layers to come, but the new snow would be drier, dustier, because the air was colder. My cloak would keep me warm while I trekked through the woods to the river, but I turned back inside and searched for the boots I had made from the same fur. The simple coverings I had sewn from gnarl hide, would not be warm enough today. Finding the fur boots behind scraps of hide, I slipped them on, and crept out again, and this time the vines did not squeak as loudly.

My breath puffed in front of me, and I was thankful for the white of my cloak, and boots. If the monsters were here, I would blend in with the horizon almost as well as the gnarls did in the cold cycles, when their fur turned as white as the snow.

I listened and looked as I walked. The woods were silent.

If the white-haired monsters were back, I did not see any sign of them.

Before I saw the river, I heard the tinkling of water tumbling over rock and newly formed ice. I knelt on the sharp edges of the fragile frozen water, and broke the clear crystals away until I could turn the rock underneath. Already the moss was shrinking. I scraped off the length of the underside, and then resettled the rock back where it had been. "Grow more, father rock," I whispered solemnly. Then, I moved to the next and repeated the same process. In the height of the warm cycles, I could gather enough in ten rocks. This morning, I scoured twice that number, and still worried it would not be enough for the two males.

My hands had reddened in the cold water, and squatting over the icy rock, I breathed hot air against my skin to warm them. I did have gloves made from the same fur, but I could not do the work wearing them. A gust of wind blew cold air under my clothes, and I longed for the warmth of my hearth.

I filled the water flasks, four of them, and twisted the brittle cork into place when I was finished.

A sound broke the stillness and I stood so quickly I almost spilled the birch basket of moss. It came from far away – echoing. A scream. Opposite from my home, so it was not the two males, unless they had woken and left. What was it? The wraith sky eyes had mentioned?

I stayed watchful as I picked my way downstream, to the cove where the river current washed into a deep pool. Worry drove my fingers to quickly untie the vine from the tree, and pull the trap free of the water. Three fish flopped helplessly in the square trap, their tails batting against the white speckled branches no thicker than my wrists, but unable to free themselves and return to their watery home. "I am sorry," I told the fish. I pulled them firmly free, one at a time, and knocked their heads with a river rock, ending their struggle. They were each about the size of two hands, and the food their deaths provided, welcome. I had more mouths to feed now than my own.

The scream stayed with me as I used the sharp edge of a rock to remove their rainbow scales, and slit their bellies, cleaning out the organs. I threw them into the pool to feed the other fish, murmuring more prayers of thanks, and then rinsed the fish clean before adding them to the pouch I had slung over my shoulder. I reset the trap, and lowered it in the pool, tying it securely to the tree. But this time, I used rock, deadfall and snow to hide the vine as well as I could.

The ice had only crept a few inches out from the water's edge, but I knew the next time I returned, I would have to break through the ice to get to my trap.

I slid quietly back into the woods, knowing I could not hide my footsteps unless I took the time to scatter the snow with branches. It would add time to my walk, but I did it anyway. I had not seen the wraith, and I had no way of knowing what had screamed, but it was not from any animal I knew, and if the two males were still in my home, than something else was out there and had made the noise.

The tracks left by the branches seemed something a careless animal would have done and I was happy enough with my work. I stopped erasing my steps as I approached the cliffs. I chose to walk the rest of the way using the round boulders scattered on the edges of the woods as stepping stones, all the way to my home. It was open to the sky, unblocked by woods, but the color was that of the cliffs, and the door was behind, with no windows. Windows would have let out precious warmth. It would be hard for any creature to find if they did not know it was here.

I hopped from the boulder down to the ground, and pulled the door open, noticing the litter remained propped against the cliff wall where I had left it yesterday. It was covered in heavy snow.

"Where have you been?" demanded sky eyes when I walked in. He was sitting next to the dark haired one, the sheet wrapped around his torso, and his face flushed.

"I needed to gather food, water and more moss," I explained, pushing the door closed behind me. I set the latch. "You look as angry as a red faced fen guarding its nest." It was the truth, though maybe it was not polite to say so, judging from the dirty look he gave me. Ignoring it, I shook off my cloak and hung it to dry. I slipped my boots off and draped them on a river rock before I moved to the shelf near the straw. I slid the pouch from my shoulder, and pulled the basket with moss free, then the water flasks, and last the fish.

"Sheppard's been mumbling incoherently. He's hot, and I'm worried. I don't know what any of this stuff is," he waved irritated hands towards my shelves of pottery jars, "and I couldn't help him. I dislike being helpless."

"You used Sheppard before. Is that his name?" I went to the dark haired one and felt his forehead. He was hot again.

"No, I just made it up."

I gave sky eyes a disbelieving look while I pulled the bandages away from the dark haired one's head.

"Of course it's his name. Colonel Sheppard, actually, and I'm Doctor McKay, together we're saving the galaxy one wraith infested planet at a time." His mouth twisted. "Well, except the ones I blew up. And the one he blew up. In fairness, he told me to, and technically, we didn't blow up the _entire_ planet, just part of it --"

The bandage slipped in my surprised fingers. "You blew up a planet?" When the word was on my tongue, I had visions of the world for as far as I could see when I stood on the tallest cliff, on the clearest day. My brow knitted. "What is a planet?"

His hand had been rubbing anxiously up and down the dark haired one's arm. With my question, it paused, and he gave me a surprised expression. "You don't even know what a planet is?" His eyes rolled to the shelves along the wall, my door and then the hearth made of black stones. Only the black river rock had the ability to absorb and give off heat. The gray, white and green would just sit there, cool to the touch except where flame would heat it only for so long as rock and flame touched. I had the feeling he had measured my life in that look. "Of course you don't, what was I thinking." His sharp eyes fixed on mine. "It doesn't matter anyway. I blew up part of a solar system, much more than one planet, and it's surprisingly pleasant meeting someone with no ability to understand just what that entails."

Sky eyes was making me feel uncomfortable, so I returned my attention to the soiled bandages. I studied the stains, and found the cut that I believed to be the source of the dark haired one's fever. There I added extra poultice, moss, and re-bandaged his head. His skin was flushed and damp, his breathing still heavy, ragged, and labored. When I finished, I held his hand flat between two of mine, so that my fingertips compressed his hand, wrist and forearm. There I felt the beat of his life against my palm. Despite how poor he looked, the pulse was regular and strong.

I moved to the other end, and pulled up the sheet from sky eyes' legs. He squawked in protest. "I must check your wound," I scolded. His muscles remained tense, but he pulled his hand away, letting me move the sheet the rest of the way. The bandage was soiled and stuck when I tried to pull it off. "Do not move." I quickly put the kettle on and heated a small amount of water till it boiled, then poured it into one of the larger bowls. When I was back, he stared at the steam rising from the wooden container.

"That's boiling! You're going to burn me, how is that making it better?"

Was sky eyes always this difficult, or was his wound making him unusually grumpy? "The water has already cooled from the air," I explained as I would to one of my distrustful patients. The creatures I treated could not understand what I did, but I explained it often anyway. I liked to hear speech, so that I never forgot how.

He began to scoot away. "Nowhere near enough," he protested desperately. "Trust me, I know the equation for changing states from a solid to a gas."

"It will be fine."

"No, really, five minutes, okay, just…five minutes. Hey, look, you've never told me your name – how'd you come to be here all by yourself? Did you see any Wraith when you were out? Oh, God, where the hell is Carson when you need him…"

I frowned. The water must be hot to help purify the wound. Still – the dark haired one needed fresh laviola. I left the bowl near sky eyes' leg and pulled the dried flowers from the shelf, moving to the kettle and dropping them into the pot. I poured only two mouthfuls of water in with the petals. Laviola was better when brewed strong. Two parts flower, two parts water. I added more wood to the fire.

When I finished, I returned to sky eyes. "Now?"

He nodded wordlessly, but stared at the bandage with worry. "This is going to hurt, isn't it?"

"Not so much as having to remove your leg if the sickness grows great in the edges of the wound, and turns green." I had seen it happen before, in animals I had not found until it was too late. Once the green began, and the stink, the limb was not salvageable.

Sky eyes himself turned green.

I barely had time to get the empty bowl under his mouth, and support his upper body. He brought up the small food he had eaten for me last night. The sickness left him shivery and weak. "I am sorry. I should not have said that." Animals did not understand. I could tell them death was near, and they would stare at me, some trusting, some not. But the statement of fact did not elicit fear. Males of my kind were not so sturdy, I supposed.

I was able to clean the wound in silence. The water had cooled too much for my comfort, but there were no signs of lingering sickness in the wound, and I packed it with fresh moss and wrapped it well.

The laviola was ready, and I scooped out the fresh into empty flasks. Sky eyes was still subdued from the earlier effort and watched as I approached the dark haired one. I poured a small amount into a small bowl, blew it to a safe touch, then dribbled it between his dry lips. Water and food now.

I prepared more ground bear root, then gave sky eyes his bowl with a spoon I had fashioned from wood in the same manner I had whittled the bowls. It was time to rouse the dark haired one, this Sheppard. He had been fitful in between lapsing into sleep. I waited for sky eyes to finish then gestured at the dark haired one. "Get behind him, and carefully gather him against your chest so that he is sitting up. We must wake him, and get him to eat and drink."

Suddenly, wind screamed through the slits above. The door rattled in its frame. The light coming in darkened, and the green glow from the walls surged. Without explaining to sky eyes, I stood, and walked quickly to the door, opening it enough to peer out. The next storm had arrived with the ferocity of the night predators. I latched the door, and gathered my fur cloak to push against the threshold at the bottom. Before I returned to sky eyes, I added more wood, glancing up at the darkened slits. When the cold cycles arrived, storms could last many turns of the night and the day.

Still, the screeching was muffled by the sturdy walls, and the fire chased away the shadows to the edges of the walls.

"If the monsters are out in this, they will not survive," I assured sky eyes. I settled in front of the dark haired one, pleased sky eyes had gathered him carefully against his chest as I had told him to do. The air was warm enough that the sheet he had was wrapped around his waist, his wounded leg stretched out to one side, with his other open so that the dark haired one could rest naturally against his back, between sky eyes' legs. Their skin against skin would only help the dark haired one. Healing creatures needed touch.

"Excuse me if I don't believe you." The words were rough, but then sky eyes turned gentle, and nudged the dark haired one. "Wake up, Sheppard. You need to eat." Sky eyes must have sensed my eyes upon him, because he looked up and made another face. "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. He needs me, but breathe a word of this to anyone when my people come for us --"

"Your words mean nothing," I said, assuring him that I would be telling no tales beyond these walls.

_A man with skin of burnished sunlight dipped over me, captured my mouth with his. "Mawani," he whispered._

"_Leom…we should not --"_

_Rich laughter filled the air, and he grabbed me in a firm hug, rolling us both over straw that made my bare skin itch. "Your words mean nothing. They will not find us, and tomorrow we will be wed. If a babe quickens, no one will know it was planted a day early..."_

My mouth was dry. Sky eyes was watching me still, confused, worried. "It means," I explained raggedly, "that I will not speak of it."

Before I had found sky eyes and the dark haired one in the woods, my memories had remained hidden. Now, they came unbidden, unwelcome. I did not want them. They had been lost with my people. Some things should remain lost. "He is Sheppard?" I said it again, though I knew it to be true, but I was struggling to regain a sense of where I was now.

"Yes, Jesus, Sheppard, just…"

I was surprised to see sky eyes' mouth tremble.

He lifted a hand off of the dark haired one's shoulder, and fisted it against his eye. "We are so screwed," he mumbled around his wrist. "Just go scout PX9-MM4, Rodney -- Ronon and Teyla are on a trade expedition and we don't have anything better to do. It'll be fine. It'll be quick, come on…damn if I _ever_ listen to you again!"

Sheppard's head was slumped, his chin touching his chest. It probably eased his breathing, or so it seemed to me. "Wake, Sheppard, you must eat," I said forcefully, letting sky eyes have time to gather himself.

He did not want to rejoin us. He had not fully woken yet, but I was persistent. Slowly, his eyes fluttered, then opened. He stared at me, confused. "You must eat," I said, holding the wooden bowl in front of him. "Just swallow, I thinned it so it will go down easily." I spooned some towards his mouth, and pushed the spoon in between his unresisting lips. He swallowed, and seemed to look around as much as possible without moving his head fully.

"Where?" he rasped.

"Pocahontas rescued us," sky eyes explained. "You've been out of it since…"

Pocahontas? I did not remember that name. "I am not Pocahontas," I corrected sky eyes.

The dark haired Sheppard tried to straighten and gasped from the pain.

"Do not move." I touched his wounded bone. "You are broken here and should stay as still as you can for at least half a moon cycle."

His eyes met mine and he nodded. I watched as he took a breath, testing how deep he could go, then he seemed to realize that he was being held by his litter mate. "Rodney, this is --"

"I know, I know," replied sky eyes. "But trust me, go with the flow on this one, which is really perverse coming from me, but she's been treating us and whatever it is, it works, and I don't have to tell you how bad it would suck to get worse in this kind of a place."

Sheppard was tiring. "Eat," I reminded him. "Sky eyes is right. I found you both in the woods, injured. He says you crashed in a ship, but I found only you. For now, you must focus on recovering."

"I don't remember," he said, swallowing another spoonful. "I think I hit my head." He lifted his opposite hand from his broken bone, and felt around, his fingers passing carefully over the bandages. He pulled his hand away and smiled crookedly. "That would be a yes, then."

While I finished feeding him, sky eyes explained that he only remembered their ship – a Jumper? had crashed, and the next thing he knew was waking up in my home. I assured them both that I did not find them anywhere near something such as a ship that flew in the sky, not that I would know one if I did, but I would know something was there beyond their bodies, the woods and the rocks.

Sheppard asked if I had found anything near them, like metal rods he called guns, or sacks with things inside. I told him the same thing I told sky eyes. There was nothing there.

Dark haired Sheppard grunted, after swallowing some water. "We need to go back where she found us, trace our tracks to the crash."

I took the flask from his trembling grip. The bowl was empty, and I got to my feet and gestured at the pallet. "I will put clean sheets down, so do not lie back yet." I put the bowls down by the brush and scouring sand, then retrieved a clean sheet, taking away the dirty one and putting the fresh on the straw mattress. Once it was finished, I helped sky eyes ease Sheppard down, careful of his broken side. Then sky eyes settled next to Sheppard, his shaking arms betraying how much the effort had cost him as well.

"We can't go yet," sky eyes said, not happy with the fact. "I can hardly sit, and I know you're down for the count, whether you want to admit it or not."

"I'm not denying anything, McKay," Sheppard said wearily.

"The storms are fighting now." I took a large hollowed length of log to the door, and pulled it open. The winds rushed in, proving my words to be true. I quickly dipped and scooped snow, then rushed to the kettle, dumping it in. I did this four times before latching the door again. "Sometimes it lasts for five or six turns of night and day." The fire began to melt the snow in the kettle. The ground bear root that was left at the bottom would help clean and purify the sheets and bandages. Once it was melted, I stirred till it boiled, then added the soiled cloth, using a log to push it down until all was soaked with the liquid. I hefted the kettle to rest on a near river rock. It must simmer until morning.

The two males were watching my every movement. Sheppard's eyes were lidded and heavy. Sky eyes…McKay, he was more awake, and more curious. "What is your name? I asked earlier, but --"

I smiled. "It is not Pocahontas."

McKay blushed and I was sure it was not the return of his fever. "Yes, well, in a way, it's a compliment."

"Let her talk, M'Kay," slurred Sheppard.

It was not time for the night sky to come, but I knew the day was waning. I would like to have Sheppard and McKay eat once more before day was done. I checked both males again to be sure they were doing well after the effort of eating. They were clean, bandaged and no fevers except a mild heat remaining in Sheppard.

While I began to prepare the fish, deboning and rubbing spices of hemma and tourn into the pale flesh, I began to tell my story.

"Many cycles ago, my dreams showed me an attack by the white haired monsters." I did not want to tell them my mind could not remember it without the aid of my dreams. "Many of them came from the night sky, burning my people, and my village." If I closed my eyes, I could always taste the smoke and feel the fear. "Then I was alone, standing in the ruins, and afraid of the ghosts. I took what I must, and left. I walked for many turns of the day and night, and found the Jade Cliffs.

I remember my father telling me of the magical green cliffs that glowed in the night. I was still worried the white haired monsters would return for me, once they realized they had left someone alive. Being before the magic of the cliffs, I felt protected and safe. Here I made my home in the warmth of the summer cycles." I remembered the long days forming bricks and leaving them to bake. As I spoke, my fingers finished with the fish, and I wrapped each one in the fat leaves of the adder tree that I had picked and preserved. I placed each bundle on a rock to bake. Now was as good of a time as any to work on the root thread, and I gathered the birch basket, and moved to my own straw mattress near theirs. They were watching me, and I sensed emotion in them. Sky eyes looked upset, while the dark haired Sheppard, his face made me think of an animal surprised by me in the woods. I did not need their worry or surprise. "I have lived alone since then, using techniques taught to me when I was a child. Some I have discovered on my own." I held a root aloft. "If you are careful, this can be split, and rolled into thread. It holds tight, but it took me many turns of day and night to learn how."

There were many things I could do, many things I had learned to survive, but there were things I could not do. I could not share my life with another of my kind, and I could not remember what it had been like to share a meal, to touch another like me. I feared I had forgotten much more than I had learned.

I had forgotten what others were like. I had forgotten what having someone to talk to felt like. I had forgotten my own name. _Mawani._

"My name is Mawani."

TBC

AN: I think there's going to be three parts, maybe only two if I can get it wrapped up. It's about 2/3rds done unless the plot bunnies demand more than I'm seeing right now. I've got the final parts sketched out, just need to write them!


	2. Chapter 2

**AN: **Thank you for the reviews, feeding the bunnies is always a good thing. I haven't gotten a chance to send individual thanks because I was busy typing! Here is the product of my busy day yesterday. The down side is now I have nothing more finished, so I think one more chapter, if all goes well, but it might be closer to the weekend if not the weekend before I get it written! Thanks again, sholio, for your invaluable beta help! All that remains is mine.

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**Chapter Two**

Morning sky was rushed in on the harsh winds of another storm, or maybe it was the same as before, the lull during the night sky's reign just a sleep before it returned to its wailing. I did not want to leave my blankets, with the warmth of the river rock heating my side.

What finally drove me was the mutterings of dark haired Sheppard. He cried _Wraith!_ and _Hold on, Rodney_! I might not know the male well, but I knew he was reliving his past in his dreams.

Before I could get to him, sky eyes McKay was already there, whispering soothing sounds in the darkness of my home. The green of the walls had faded to almost nothing, the fire had burned itself out mid-night sky, and now all that remained were the feeble tries of morning sky weeping through the holes above.

I felt like a rock, not needed now, as McKay eased Sheppard's dream terrors. Instead of going to them, I pretended to have more important things, and I made a breakfast of grains stripped from the white weed.

When I ladled three equal portions into bowls, and turned to carry them to my two injured males, I was surprised to find them watching me. I could not read the dark haired one, but sky eyes looked a confusing mix of worry and hunger.

"It is good," I assured him, waiting for him to push himself into sitting. He took the bowl from me, lifted it, sniffed with the same distrust of a gnarl. I was laughing inside at his antics.

Sky eyes huffed at me. "Are you laughing at me? I have appropriate fear, something you as a…simple --"

"McKay," dark haired Sheppard rumbled.

Sky eyes did not make me worry. I helped him move until he was ready to take Sheppard's weight against his chest, then held tight to Sheppard's hands as sky eyes McKay helped pull his injured litter mate into position. It was the third time, and they both were learning to do it with the least amount of pain to either one. The fish dinner had been held down well and helped them continue to heal.

Now ready, I handed Sheppard his bowl, both looking at how well he was, and letting him know in my smile that nothing sky eyes did could make me sad. "It is fine, Sheppard," I said. With my bowl, I sat by their feet. "I laughed at him first."

"See, at least she admits it, whereas some people --"

Sheppard grimaced at his bowl, as if his head was hurting him, and I was sure it did. "Just eat."

Sky eyes did well at balancing Sheppard while eating, and a silence took over while we ate. I did not mind, because I had been alone in my silence for many cycles. When I finished, I saw they were still eating. Their bites were small, their chewing slow. "Is it not good?"

Sheppard looked from me to his bowl, then back to me, an odd look on his lips. "Well, uh, Mawani," he spoke politely, but I felt bad words hiding on his tongue, "it's fine, we're just not really used to…"

"Eating food our domesticated animals live on," supplied sky eyes.

"I told you to eat," hissed Sheppard. "Telling the lady that rescued us and cared for our owies that her food is what we feed our dogs is not really nice, McKay."

McKay choked on his mouthful.

"What is a dog?"

Sheppard pantomimed a medium sized thing. He forgot about his broken bone, and gasped a little from the pain. I frowned at his hand and stared pointedly at his chest. He rolled his eyes a little upwards and I got the feeling he was telling me without words that he did not need my mothering. Lucky for him, I did not think so.

"Two ears, tail, wet nose and a whole lot of love," said dark haired Sheppard. "Every kid needs one growing up."

Sky eyes snorted. "Let me guess, you had a dog? What makes a dog intrinsically better for a kid than a cat? Cats are people too, you know."

"Cats think they're doing you a favor if they let you pet them, McKay…now dogs," he winced a little as he moved too much again, "they think the sun rises and sets on you. That's good for the ego."

"My ego's just fine, thank you," responded sky eyes irritably. He pushed back, trying to stretch his legs. "God, move, you're numbing my legs."

I was feeling lost amidst their talk. But I understood McKay's need, and put my bowl aside, helping Sheppard back down, feeling sympathy for the groans he tried to hold back. "Another quarter of a moon cycle, and the pain should be much less," I assured him.

He was sweaty, and nodded, but it took many breaths before he stopped holding his lips together tightly, and the whiteness faded away. "We've got a real problem."

"Problem?" I echoed.

But McKay was scooting over and nodding. "If that wraith ship crashed like we did, if they survived, then I think it's a fairly safe assumption that they'll find us. Seeing how we're more or less immobile, I think 'problem' is a bit of an understatement."

"If you are afraid these wraith will find us, do not worry." I lifted my finger to my lips, to show them to be quiet. Dark haired Sheppard had his left hand pillowed under his head, and he paused, listened carefully. Sky eyes looked ready to speak, but I pinched my eyebrows together and reasserted my finger against my lips. He pushed his mouth together and waited.

I let the wailing wind invade our thoughts. The rattling of the door.

"The storm is still strong, with much anger left," I explained. "Nothing alive will be coming for us."

"Who said they were alive," grouched sky eyes McKay. "They don't look like badly made-up zombies for nothing."

He was trying to hide his fear behind his surliness, but I watched him as he turned away from dark haired Sheppard, and studied the clay wall, the pile of straw, and then his eyes narrowed on my –

"Who's that?"

I scrambled to my feet, hurried to the picture and pushed it behind the straw. When I turned back, sky eyes looked startled, while Sheppard seemed to see too deeply through me. I stood there, trembling, feeling the softness of my tunic against my body. "My memories were dead before you came," I accused.

"You drew that," dark haired Sheppard stated. He looked frustrated. I saw him try to move, and wince when it drew back the pain. He clenched his hands in the sheet and stared angrily at the ceiling. "It was a baby."

The smell of sour milk and jassim powder floated around me; I could feel her skin against my own, as soft as a gnarl's hide that had been worn for many cycles. I remembered. A small hand clutching my finger, a tiny mouth, suckling.

My baby!

My_ Lillani_.

But it was nothing more than dust in my mind, ghosts in my ears, and memories on my skin.

I pushed the memories away, unwanted. "Your bandages need changing." I ignored their looks of sorrow and pity. The jars felt solid in my hands and I clasped them tightly, clinging to the present. Aches from the past were worthless.

When I knelt by Sheppard, he held my wrist. "Mawani…"

Withdrawing my hand from his, I reached above him, and began to unwind the soiled strips of sheet. "Your wounds are healing, but one cut is deep, it still tries to grow sick." I placed the palm of my hand softly against his forehead, knowing the ache remained, feeling the lingering heat. "You must rest."

"The wraith can recover faster, and they'll be looking for us."

"Death waits for all things, Sheppard." Without giving him more time for further words, I tipped the flask of laviola to his lips. He drank, then let his head drop, exhausted from the effort.

During our talk, sky eyes McKay had fallen quiet. I moved to him, checked his leg and was happy to see it was continuing to heal. It weeped only a little now. "It is healing well," I told him, feeling his eyes on me. "But you, too, must rest." I checked the bruising on his chest, and ignored his embarrassed squawk. It looked worse than I had hoped, but the flesh remained soft. "It will heal, too, in time." I drew up the sheet, passed a comforting hand across his brow. "I know you both worry about the wraith, but we are safe here. When I was a little girl, my father told me the magic of the Jade Cliffs would protect our people."

McKay's lips crooked into a ghost of a smile. "Than why are they all dead?"

"Because they did not believe," I said simply. "Now, rest. I have much work to do, and you and dark haired Sheppard talk until my thoughts grow muddled."

"Did she just say we talk too much?" sky eyes demanded of Sheppard.

Sheppard's eyes smiled. "I think she did, McKay."

OoO

The storm fought against day and night sky for six turns. I slept in between caring for Sheppard and McKay, rinsing bandages, and cooking meals. They spoke often, sometimes of things I could not understand. But then, they spoke of a city in the sea. A city with fingers reaching towards the sky, and many more people, both female and male.

Sheppard's head fought to heal; his will to be well was winning over the wound's tries at sickness. Still, the fever would come and go, sometimes leaving him weak and exhausted, panting by sky eyes' side. In the depths of night sky's time, I would often hear sky eyes McKay easing Sheppard's nightmares. I do not think they were all caused by what brought them to my world. He cried out _Kolya_! And _Sumner_! When sky eyes would wake Sheppard, sometimes they murmured quietly in the dim green glow, long towards the morning sky's arrival. I overheard words about who was better, Batman or Spiderman, and did not think they used real words – they must surely say nonsense things to make one another smile. Yet, they argued quietly till the fire had died, and in the end, I believe something else won, they both agreed, Wonder woman.

There were times when McKay whimpered in his sleep. Memories haunted his thoughts, as well. Sheppard would shake him softly, and whisper. I believed even more that these two were litter mates, such was the care they showed, though their words often said otherwise. Some words were said with such irritation and anger that I felt for sure they would not speak again, only for one to frown at the other, then they would change words and talk about something else.

I watched them often while I worked root thread, or cleaned dishes. I found them watching me. And all around us, the sky was battered by the storm's anger. When I awoke to the quietness on the sixth turn, and saw the sliver of sun shining, I wanted to kiss the sun. As much as I was happy to speak with others of my kind, at times, I found it overwhelming.

More memories had rushed through me, their arrival breaking the dam in my mind.

The presence of two males, through every turn of night and day, was also strange. I found myself changing tunics under my blanket during the night sky. They did not wish for me to help them bathe, and I had to argue many words to get them to understand it was either that, or they would sleep with the storm.

Sky eyes rolled to his side while I helped Sheppard, then Sheppard agreed to close his eyes when it was McKay's turn. I laughed, unable to stop. "Is there a part of you that is different than him?" I asked sky eyes.

His face flushed. "Yes, there is. Despite what people say, it's not, 'see one, see them all', thank you very much."

Sheppard pushed his eyes shut and said, "He's just worried because I've got bigger hands than he does."

The choking from sky eyes made me feel that Sheppard had said something that should have remained unspoken for their people, and McKay's face flamed hotter. I scolded Sheppard, and assured sky eyes I would be quick.

It was not easy for them, accepting the routine of using the small pots when they had to empty their bodies of waste, either, but I had an area where I hung another old sheet using sticks from the litter, so that there was a way for them to believe the others were not watching. The storm was so loud, no one worried about listening. I did not let them take the pots outside; their wounds did not need the movement. I had been cleaning up after myself and animals for my entire life, it seemed, and two more did not make my life any harder.

"It's quiet," whispered Sheppard, startling me.

I straightened my blanket, before creeping across the room to his side. "The storm has worn itself out finally. I must go to the river, check my trap and get more water. Do you need anything?"

He looked over at sky eyes, shook his head, but before I had my cloak around my shoulders, he called, serious, "Be careful, all right? If the wraith are out there, you won't be able to stop them."

I pulled my fur boots on, and stepped around the room to gather my satchel. "What more can they do to me?" I looked sadly down at him. "Before you came, I had fear. Now, I begin to feel, death does not scare me. I am the last of my people, and when I die, I may once again walk with my loved ones, and speak their names."

"Fine, I'll be afraid for both of us," he said reasonably. "Just be careful."

"I know the woods as I know the skin on my body. I will be fine." After assuring him, I lifted the latch, and disappeared into the white horizon, chased by the warm air that snuck out behind me.

OoO

The winds had packed the snow; drifts overtook small trees, boulders and the cliffs. My home was even more hidden than it had been before, and I did not worry about leaving McKay and Sheppard. I walked carefully, but found the deep snow tiring. It was time to build my shoes of wood to make walking easier. Mindful of my tracks, I gathered an evergreen branch and brushed the surface as I went.

The effort made me sweat in my clothes.

When I neared the river, I saw other tracks, deep and heavy, in the cold blanket. Slowing, I gripped the branch in my hands, feeling the rough bark scratch against my palm. The snow that was pushing up above my boots chilled my skin when I held still, yet, I listened to the air.

Behind me, the woods grew tall and many, with the leaf-bearing trunks stripped of their summer clothes. The evergreens sat, ponderously wearing a new weight of a coat of snow.

Everything was still.

I moved forward, angling my steps to take me near the tracks. As I scattered my own, I did not fail to notice the similarity. The tracks were that of an animal on two legs, not four, with a wide step, and heavy body, to sink in the snow so far. I noticed something more, a black liquid dripped between the steps. Wondering, I leaned and touched a finger to one. It was cold, frozen.

The storm had blown out during the night sky, so these tracks and…was it life's blood? They could not be even a turn of night old. I straightened, holding to my satchel and my evergreen branch, and scanned the horizon uncertainly. I had not lied when I told Sheppard I no longer feared death. My memories, so raw and new again, had shown me there are worse things than death.

Living when everyone else had died.

Still, Sheppard and McKay were wounded and depended on me. I did not know what lay ahead, but they had claimed their people would come for them. And that if they did not come, when the snows left, they would find their ship and fix it. Then they would take me, and we would all leave this world. They would take me to the city in the sea with the fingers to the sky.

I did not believe that I would ever leave my world, but I let them say their words. I knew they needed their hope of seeing loved ones again.

My knees had grown numb from the cold and I shook away the thoughts. The river was iced for many steps; only the fast-moving water in the middle ran free. I walked along the banks until I came to the pool, and using the end of the branch, I dug free the vine for my trap. In my satchel I had a small tool, a sharpened blade I had found in my village ruins, beaten into a thick log the length of my forearm to make a sturdy handle.

I followed the vine until it disappeared into the ice at the edge, knowing my trap was further ahead in the deeper water. The still water of the pool had frozen completely; the ice was strong enough to hold my weight, but thin enough that I could still chip through and reach the trap. I paced ten steps out and scraped a circle wider than the trap.

When my circle was marked, I left the pool, left my satchel, and found a river rock the size of my hand. Hurrying back, I took my cloak from my shoulders and spread it out for my knees, thankful for the warmth of the soft fur against my legs. The effort of breaking the ice would warm my body, but skin on ice would never warm.

I pounded the fat end of the sharp rock tool, creating a small chip in the ice. I moved the tool over and repeated the same step. I knelt for many moments, and by the time I felt the circular chunk dip free into the water, I was sore and tired. The angle I used to break it free allowed me to wiggle the branch until I could get my hands under and lift it free. The ice was heavy and slippery; once I pulled too hard too soon and almost fell into the hole when my boots slid out from under me. Breathing hard, I managed to stay on the ice, and finally pulled it free, tugging it to the side. When I was done, I would put it back and sprinkle snow to try and hide any trace of having been here. If a white-haired monster did notice, there would be no doubt that other two-legged animals were sharing this world with it, and it would look harder to find where.

First, I filled the flasks with fresh water. Then, I used a stick with a curved tip to fish for the vine. When I caught it, I pulled, and felt the weight before I had it free of the icy water. The trap had seven fat fish, two that were larger than three hands. I was fortunate, because Sheppard and McKay grew hungrier. I dug into the snow by the shore, creating a cave almost to the ground. There I killed, cleaned and gutted the fish, murmuring another soft prayer of thanks for the life they gave me; then I carried the guts to throw in the water to be eaten by others. I rinsed my bloody hands in the cold water, feeling my fingers fat and red from the cold and the ice. Not all the blood was from the fish. Chopping ice often gave me new scars.

The cold made my blood reluctant to leave my body, and I covered the area I had used, taking snow from drifts to fill the hole where I had cleaned the fish. I levered the ice back into place and gathered yet more drift snow and sprinkled it over. From a distance, it would look undisturbed. Up close, the damage was not so easily hidden, despite how often I kept spreading and layering. It looked unnatural.

Admitting defeat in doing any better, I gathered my satchel, now full of fish, and shook my fur cloak free of ice before wrapping it around my shoulders. It had gotten wet, and I shivered underneath. I had gone from cold to hot, back to cold and then hot and now I was cold again. I would need to sit by the fire for a while to warm my blood.

A branch snapped behind me.

My breath died in my chest. I swallowed back the sudden rise of fear. Had I not said I was not afraid? I forced my numb feet to turn in time to see it running at me. A white-haired monster, as if it had left my memory and formed in front of me. I scrambled back, fell, and fought to rise and run, but the snow was deep and tripped my feet again. I heard its harsh breaths near.

I was grabbed on my shoulder, and flipped until I was sitting. It breathed hard, erratic, and that is when I saw the broad span of a bloody mark on its chest, the sunken face. Something was wrong with this white haired monster. I kicked, desperate, recalling Sheppard's words of warning and, "I'll be afraid for both of us."

The choking fear I felt now was more than enough for the two of us. I might not be afraid of death, but suddenly I found, I was still afraid of the white haired monsters.

The snow was icy against my back, the wet of my cloak pressing against me. The monster was angry but oddly weak. I remembered the sharp ice-cutting tool nestled against my chest in the satchel. It began to kneel towards me, its breath raspy and stinking of dead things. My fingers wrapped around the handle. My knees were bent, snow was against my thighs. I chanted a prayer to the God in the sky, and when his hand came at my chest, I thrust the sharpened tip of blade through it.

The creature screamed in pain and pulled its hand back.

I did not wait, rolling, until my knees were under me, and then scrambling to my feet, slipping. I clung to the satchel and ran, taking leaps over the snow, not looking back. When I heard nothing behind me and knew I had ran as far as I could, I stopped, and looked, certain it would be on me, but nothing was there. Just the woods. The evergreens.

Painful breaths of icy air chilled my air cavities as I bent at the waist and tried to breathe.

I suddenly laughed. I was alive.

And I still had my fish.

Knowing to linger was to ask for death, I hurriedly pulled a fresh evergreen branch, and began the hard trek back to my home. When I hopped from the final boulder and stood before my door, my knees grew weak, and I pulled the latch, fell inside, and slammed it behind me, letting my body sink to the floor.

It had been many cycles since I had felt such pain, fear and worry. My heart still thumped madly against my chest.

"What happened?"

I looked up from my lap. McKay was watching me, Sheppard sleeping by his side. I tried to smile reassuringly, but instead, I felt my face crumple and I began to sob. Harsh, painful sobs, wrenched from inside. I pulled my knees to my chest, and wrapped my arms around them tightly, trying to hold on. I felt as if my insides were shattering into a river-full of tiny pieces.

His touch, when it came, was light and wary, but then he was dragging his leg until he had me held against his chest. He wrapped his warm hands around my shoulders. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "Just…oh God, why isn't Sheppard awake…"

His words meant nothing to me.

OoO

"There's more than one." Sheppard was propped against McKay, using his left arm to stir the ground bear root and fish stew in his bowl. "You described a feeding mark, and I'd bet my last year's pay that his buddy did it to him." He smiled wryly at me. "It's probably the only reason why you're still alive."

I nodded, letting my hair fall across my face. My eyes still felt red and puffy, though I had bandaged my ice-scraped hands and changed into dry clothes. Sky eyes had comforted me -- I knew it had been difficult for him -- until my sobs had died. My shivers had passed to him, and I had finally pulled away, feeling both better and worse for it. Worse, because he should not have left his bed and now I had chilled him, but better, because I had been comforted by the touch of another of my kind. I had forgotten what it felt like.

By then, Sheppard had woken. He had tried to come to us, to help me and to help McKay, but I told him to stay. His broken bone would soon be mended enough for him to move and I would not risk him re-injuring it. I helped sky eyes back to his bed, his skin rippled with bumps from the cold of my body. All he and Sheppard wore was their underclothes. I had washed their other clothes, pants and shirts, stitched scraps to make them wearable, but for lying in bed, I told them it was best to stay in their underwear, so long as the fevers fought to return time and time again. Besides, the others had stains and tears I could not fix.

Sheppard had asked me what had happened while I ducked under my blankets and pulled off my wet clothes. I told the story of finding the tracks, then the white haired monster appearing behind me, almost ending my life, thankful for the privacy to hide not only my nakedness, but also the trembles of my body that had nothing to do with the cold.

He had asked questions about this wraith, and when I had described the mark on his chest, Sheppard had become more alert and interested than I had ever seen him before.

While I prepared the stew, he and McKay talked about defensive weapons. Now that we were eating, I sat by the warm river rock, listened, and felt thankful to just be alive. The stew was spiced with red and white snappers. It burned in my throat.

"Mawani, you're sure there weren't any black metal objects near us? Or black bags like our clothes?" Sheppard rubbed the middle of his forehead. "If we could just get one of our guns…"

"I promise, there was nothing near you except each other." But in the back of my mind, I felt guilty because I had not looked. I had not looked amidst the trees to see where they had come from, which direction, and if they had lost anything nearby, and by the time they asked, the snows had come and now it was too late.

Not one to be discouraged, Sheppard took my words without showing the same worry as McKay. With a quick smile, he said, "You're handy with making things. Maybe we can make spears."

McKay seemed to consider Sheppard's idea and I could tell by the expression on his face, he thought Sheppard was being less than serious, but Sheppard's words made me remember something I had not thought of in many moons. I set my bowl to the floor, stood and walked to the wall near the picture. I could feel their eyes on me. Kneeling, I pulled the picture free from where I had shoved it earlier, only pausing long enough to feel the pain again, before I set it aside and pushed the straw away.

I had revealed a wooden box, built in the times before my grandsires. It had rested there, against the wall, a ghost of my father who had given it to me on my joining day. "I have only used this once, when I was too stupid to stay out of the woods at night."

The lid creaked, the old metal hinge dirty orange from many years of life. I pulled the bow, quiver of arrows, and the jar of oil made from the mud of the cliffs free from the box. When I turned to them, my weapons in hand, I expected to see relief, but instead, I saw dismay on McKay's face, and a hardened acceptance on Sheppard's. They did not understand.

"With this weapon and a true aim, even a night predator will fall in one shot." I held the jar higher after handing the bow to Sheppard. "This is poison, so strong that only two drops kill, but it must mingle with life's blood." It was distasteful for me, to kill in such a way, and the poison rendered the meat of the animal useless – it could not be eaten after the body was tainted with the poison. It was a waste, and I had only used it for protection.

But I would not be eating the white haired monster, and killing to protect my wounded males was something I was sure I would not regret.

McKay scanned my home, his mouth twisted derisively, before his sky eyes locked onto mine. "Did I miss Robin Hood's arrival? Because what I'm seeing, are two wounded men, hardly capable of feeding themselves, and a girl who admits she's only used it once."

I frowned. "McKay, as children, my people are…were raised to shoot. There were great competitions, every nine cycles. It has been long since I have put finger to string, but old skills long taught never leave, they merely dull. Not all predators are white haired monsters."

Part of my memories that had returned included the roar of a crowd, the smell of roasting meat and loud music. Laughter, smiles, and children dodging around the legs of full-growns.

I closed my eyes for just a moment.

Remembering was painful. These males were of my kind but they had professed to not be of the world – this world that I had thought was all that there was. I had no one to ask, "Do you remember the fairs? When the men and women competed to hit the farthest and the smallest target? When the meat roasted till it was crispy on the outside, but exploded with juice on the first bite – when the flutes played to the dancing of the flames long into the night sky, and the children fell to sleep in the laps of their mothers?"

I was the only one to have these memories. They were mine alone, and even then, I had forgotten for many cycles. My eyes opened again, and the two men watched me. I felt they could see through my skin and into my heart, touch my loneliness, because I wore it like a cloak.

Yet, they stayed silent.

Sheppard held his hand out, waving towards the bow. "Let me see it."

It was better their way. To not mention the dead. Physical pain was enough to endure; the pain of the soul was worthy of burying deep and leaving alone. I took their way, and pushed the thoughts into the darkness from where they had come. I had done it before, I could do it again.

He'd set aside his food, only half-eaten. I brought him the weapon, handing him the bow and arrows, while keeping the poison. I would not like for him to accidentally spill it anywhere near their open wounds. Accidents were like storms, coming unbidden and unpredicted.

Sheppard's eyes often let little past them, clouded windows that only cleared when he wished them to. Now, he let me see that my bow was only a little helpful. His smile was strained. "It's better than a spear, gives us distance, but we have no idea if this poison works on a wraith, and I'd hate to find out it doesn't when it keeps charging towards us." He shrugged, as if to say he was sorry. "Wraith don't die easily, Mawani. Not even when we hit them with weapons more powerful and damaging than this."

"You said the poison was made from cliff oil?" McKay spoke, looking thoughtful now, rather than worried. "It's the second time you've mentioned the cliffs as having properties beyond the primitive." Sky eyes looked down at Sheppard, still propped against sky eyes' chest, even though neither one ate now. "What if that's why we couldn't register her life signs? If that's what is keeping the wraith from finding us now?" He snapped the fingers on his hands, making a fast, rapid sound like a fen in a tree when it hunted for worms. "What if it's like salt water to the Iratus bug!"

"I thought we agreed never to mention --"

"Those bugs, I know, sorry but it would be incredibly stupid to describe it and I'd think that would be even more disturbing."

Dark haired Sheppard still looked a little pale, the cause -- could it be the mere mention of a bug? But he nodded reluctantly. "Help me up," he said.

I stared at his struggles and at McKay's already-in-motion arms and legs, shifting to rise, so that he could help Sheppard. "No, you must not," I rushed to say, but they were whether I wished it or not and I still held the poison in my hands, unable to physically move them back to their bed.

I turned now, and put the poison back in the box. By the time I had it stowed safely, they were on their feet, both of them -- shaky, pale and their faces lined with pain. "This is foolish." I walked heavily to them, bent and lifted their bowls. "If you re-injure your bone, it could pierce the air cavity and I do not know if I can save you." I flicked accusing eyes at his litter mate. "Your wound may pull open, become infected again." Knowing already some of his weaknesses, I added, "It will hurt a great deal. Is that what you wish?"

Sky eyes' face grew even whiter. But his chin came up. "Death by wraith would hurt a lot more, so pardon me for deciding on the lesser of two evils."

"I do not know what either of you hope to accomplish!" My fingers held onto the wooden bowls, feeling the little rises and valleys from the uneven whittling against my palms. I was afraid for them. Afraid they would become sick again, and that this time I would not be able to save them. I let my hair of straw hide my face and walked to the sand and pebbles, setting the bowls down for cleaning. I knew how fragile life was, how easily it was lost to illness.

Lillani, she had been borne to me in the cycles of cold, after my home was ready and everything should have been safe. She had been all I had left of my kind. A moon cycle after her birth, she fell sick. Her air cavities grew sluggish and raspy, like the whispers of wind in the treetops. She fought to live, through many turns of sun and night, to the point I thought surely it would end, one way or the other. Then, the rise of sun sky brought a quiet to my home and her strained fight for life. Lillani had lost to the sickness, and I had lost so much more.

It was after that when I vowed to learn new ways to heal. It was too late for my daughter, but not for the other creatures around me. Life should not be made to suffer, to linger in pain and fear.

"If you die --"

A gentle hand touched my shoulder, and I turned to see dark haired Sheppard, his eyes soft. There was salt on my lips. "If you die," I repeated, "then I will be alone again."

Sky eyes joined him, his face looking like it had when he had held me in my sobs before. Then, his mouth curled. "Trust me, we don't die easily. I hate to say it, because usually that's a given jinx, but we've survived certain death more than a few times. Why should this be any different?"

"Exactly," agreed Sheppard. He held a hand up, his fingers splayed loosely in the air. "There was the time…" he slowed his speech, looked uncomfortable, "…with the bug." A finger was touched with another. "Then there was the self-destruct that one wraith had." They shared a boyish grin. "Almost blew us up." Another finger was ticked.

"And don't forget the close call with all those kids," enthused McKay. "They were going to kill you."

"Because you took the ZPM!"

Sky eyes turned from me to face Sheppard. "Only to check the level; I was bringing it back."

"Curiosity kills the Sheppard." Dark haired Sheppard said it with a chuckle, but McKay looked slightly sheepish, like a child scolded for using mother's flour while being praised for making a fine loaf of bread.

The salt had dried on my face, and I found myself smiling along with them. These two males, with their arguing, and caring, and strange words had invaded my lonely life. "Then I will have to trust in your fortune to save us all," I said.

Sheppard's smile disappeared, his memories leaving him in the difficult present, and he nodded, serious again. "That's right. Now, we need to set a watch."

"A watch?"

They were growing tired, their show of getting to their feet more to prove they could, than anything, I believed. I listened as Sheppard explained the need for someone to stay awake at all times, and to make sure a wraith did not come through my door. I pulled the wood crate near enough to the river rock, draped my cloak over the top. "Sit," I instructed. "If one must keep watch, one must have some place to sit rather than fall over."

They shared rueful looks, then moved to the crate, both sitting with muted groans.

"Tomorrow, when both of you are stronger, we should test your strength with the bow." I took it from the floor where Sheppard had set it, and leaned it against the wall. "Tonight, I have my knife." I withdrew it from the satchel, surprised to see the black blood of the white haired monster still clinging to the blade. I had forgotten to wash it in the snow.

Sheppard's eyes tracked to the stain. "That's wraith, all right."

Feeling the fear again, I quickly moved to the door, opened the latch. A gust of cold wind pushed against my face as I knelt and wiped the blade in the snow, back and forth, quickly.

It wouldn't come off.

I wiped harder and harder, and still, it remained.

"Mawani, it's clean." Sheppard was there, grabbing my hands, his eyes so very clear.

"It is stained." Stained by the white haired monsters that had taken my people, my world. "It is there, can you not see it?" I held the blade up in the twilight of sun giving ground to moon.

I was savagely pleased.

I had hurt a white haired monster, maybe killed it.

He shivered, still holding me. The knife was cold in my hands and I let him take it from me.

Sky eyes pulled me in and Sheppard shut the door.

I suddenly realized the stain was on me, no longer the blade. I had only killed before in self defense, and while this was just as much the same, it came burdened with the anger and hatred I felt against the white haired ones. I did not hate the night predator I killed. I did not hate the gnarl I eased into the otherworld.

But I hated the white haired monster.

I pulled away from sky eyes, moving to wall where my satchel rested, the fish still tucked safely away. "We should eat dinner." With my words, I closed the door to what had happened. I did not wish to talk about it more, and I began to work, watching from under my lashes as they sat.

Dark haired Sheppard held my knife and I felt it was better in his hands than mine. I suddenly wished to never touch it again.

The fish needed to be prepared; I would preserve some with tourm, and the rest I would cook tonight. Sheppard and McKay were losing themselves in talk and I found the need to lose myself in the routine of chores. Fire, food, cleaning. There was peace in work.

I had a feeling, and I felt I could almost touch it -- that my life was changing, leaving that which I had known for so long, and it would never be the same again. The arrival of the two males had changed everything. I had others to talk with, to care for, and suddenly, I did not want them to leave, ever. But they had promised to take me with them – could I leave the only home I had ever known?

Who would care for the aged beast, waiting to die at the water's edge? Or the wounded fen, fallen from a nest?

Who would remain to remember the ghosts?

And the white haired monsters that were out there – had I killed one, or wounded it further? I knew a wounded creature was more dangerous than a healthy one, prone to desperate acts of doing anything to stay alive. Their actions became irrational, erratic. You could not predict if they would jump at you, or turn and run.

The slits above my head turned to black, the smoke stung my eyes, and we ate a quiet dinner of baked fish, spicy with the extra jassim I had used. I told Sheppard I would take first watch, and sent them to bed, both males exhausted from sitting upright for so long. It had been ten turns of moon and sun since I had found them. It was earlier than I wished for Sheppard and McKay to be moving about, yet they did seem to be doing well. The bandages were off Sheppard's head, the fever had not returned in at least two turns of night and sun. Sky eyes moved with less pain and less of a limp.

While they slept, I pulled the jar of oil from the box and prepared to carefully dribble three drops into the hollow arrow tips. Two would fell a night predator, three should work on the white haired wraith.

On second thought, perhaps four.

I fingered the metal tips, feeling the chill of the rounded points. These had been made by the heat of a fire and from metal similar to that of the hinges on the box. It was not something I knew how to do, and these would have to last. Each tip had a special design, a small metal ball within. It kept the poison inside but when it impacted flesh, the sudden pressure pushed the small marble upwards, releasing the liquid drops.

Ten times I counted out four drops, then screwed the tips tight to the shaft. I tested the hold to make sure it would not come loose accidentally.

When that was finished, I took the arrows and set them near the bow, putting the oil back in the box. I would need to warn Sheppard and McKay not to touch them unless a white haired monster was near.

I would not have prepared them but for the memory of the monster. These males were in my home. I had saved their lives. I would not sit by and let the white haired monsters kill them now.

Come morning I would need to collect green branches, and from them I would shape practice arrows.

Finished with my work and with nothing now to keep my hands busy, the wispy sounds of McKay and Sheppard's breathing made me sleepy. The hissing, crackling, popping fire sung my mind into a foggy stupor. Was my time done?

I used the strange device dark haired Sheppard had given me from his wrist to check. I had never seen anything like it before, but he called it a watch, and I guessed it was part of this sitting up and staring, as they had called it a watch, also.

When I had first asked, "What is this?" sky eyes had held up a finger and said, "One." Then he had lifted each one after and counted higher, "Two, three, four, five --" until I had put my hand against his.

"Five," I said. I put my other hand against his. "Ten."

He grunted, but seemed pleased. "Good, you can count."

"Since I could see my toes." I wiggled them against the floor, feeling the dirt solid and cold against my skin.

"We do watches in two-hour increments." At my puzzled expression sky eyes had made a face, pointed a finger at the number he called twelve then moved it to the two – "Two hours."

They had then gone willingly to sleep. I was relieved now to see the number finally on the two; my turn was over. I tried to shake off sleepiness enough to rise and walk to their bed. I knelt and shook sky eyes, whispering so as not to wake Sheppard. "It has been quiet."

He nodded, took the knife from the floor beside the crate and hunched down on the lid. A shiver stole across his skin and I lifted a blanket from their bed and draped it over his shoulders. "Good watch," I murmured, wishing him well, before I slipped into my own bed.

I slept then, deep and dark, finding myself often with the white haired monster leaning over me, again and again, and each time I thrust the knife and ran. It was the same, nothing ever changed. Until the last time, when I reached for the knife and it was not there. The white haired monster's mouth pulled open in anticipated pleasure, then the hand came towards my chest.

I woke to Sheppard watching, felt the shadow of fear still on me, my breaths heavy in my chest.

"Bad dreams?" His eyebrow asked even with his words.

"The white haired one is persistent." I slipped from my blankets and from the remnants of my night terrors. I noticed my knife across his lap, small and insignificant. "It is a little thing to kill a monster." I was now certain I had only wounded the white haired wraith by stabbing it. Made it angrier.

It knew I was here and it would be looking, searching for where I had gone. But it did not know there were two others.

Sheppard had followed my gaze, seemed to consider the knife, before meeting my worried look with a casual one of his own. "A weapon doesn't have to be big to kill."

I crept across the dimly lit room, lifted a handful of wood, the dry bark rough against my skin, and moved to the hearth. While they had kept watch, they had been feeding the fire, so now it only needed a little more to spring up, bright and warm. I laid the wood carefully. "Have you killed many?" Part of me believed he had killed more than I would want to hear about.

"I've only killed when I had to."

"Many?"

Why was I pressing?

I was curious, maybe, but also, I wanted to know more of who this dark haired Sheppard was. Did he kill easily? Did it leave marks on his soul and regret in his heart?

A shadow grew on his face. His voice became empty. "More than I wanted."

We stared long enough for me to let him know that I was sorry for what he had seen and done, and he to let me know, with those eyes of many colors, that he was not of the same soul as a white haired monster. Speech was not for every moment.

Then he stood, only wincing a little at the lingering pain in his chest, and moved to wake McKay. I prepared more white weed, flavored with a bit of honeycomb, and we ate. McKay was still slow with his bowl, the taste one that he was not fond of, but he did finish. Perhaps they were right in being up. Maybe it was time for them to begin moving, and gathering strength from exercise.

"Get dressed," I said, surprising them. "That is, if you wish to come with me while I gather wood for new arrows." I had not even finished speaking before they were moving towards their folded clothing. "If you feel strong enough, we can practice shooting when we return."

Their embarrassment of being in the underclothes had faded and now they dressed, although slowly, because their wounds were a constant reminder that haste hurt. Their pants, shirts, then outer cloaks went on. The boots took longer. Sky eyes was quickly tying his when Sheppard tried to bend, a grunt of pain his only reward.

McKay's fingers paused and he looked across at Sheppard. "Let me guess, you need me to tie your boots?"

Through gritted teeth, Sheppard said, "If you could, Rodney, I'd appreciate it."

For a moment, I thought McKay was going to say something more, but he seemed to gather in Sheppard's frustration, and he settled instead for an irritated sigh, and knelt awkwardly, trying to not put much weight on his healing leg. He expertly tied Sheppard's boots and leaned back, appreciating his work. "Still got the touch – I haven't tied anyone else's shoes since Jeannie was little, and even then I made her learn at 4 because..." He looked up at Sheppard, his thoughts seemed to jumble, and he ended up shrugging. "She was smart and I had other things to teach her besides how to tie her shoes."

"Like what, the periodic table?"

Sheppard stood, pushing his arm into his chest to keep the pain away. When he was up, he offered a hand to McKay.

"Among other things," McKay answered, almost defensively.

I had waited by the door, dressed today in my blue tunic, with my gnarl-hide boots. I had already tested the weather and found it warm, unusually so for the cold cycles. We would not be gone long enough that I would need my fur today. "If you are ready," I interrupted, fearing the two might continue to bat words between them, almost like two montha mice would with a crumb of bread.

They joined me at the door and I led them outside, watching as they inhaled deeply of the smoke-free air. It was the first time they had stepped over the threshold since I had dragged them in, wounded and asleep, so many days ago.

We walked farther into the glaring light; Sky eyes clutched my knife, I, my bow, and Sheppard carried the poisoned arrows. I had warned them of the arrows as they dressed, to take extra care and to not let the tips anywhere near their skin. This would not be a long trip, and I did not think we would run into any night predators, but I brought the bow and the arrows in case the white haired monster had found my home, or was hiding near, in the woods.

"This is…" Sky eyes cleared his throat and looked around more as we left the shadows, his eyes traveling up the great length of the cliffs, before drifting to the scattered boulders, now free of their snow, leading into the woods. "New. I don't remember it at all." He squinted, then looked over at Sheppard. "Do you? Any of this jarring a 'we left the ship that way' moment?"

Sheppard shrugged his shoulders. "I got nothing, McKay." His eyes were scrunched, too, and I could see the traces of pain along the edges of his eyes. His head ached again.

"I did not find you near my home." I pointed in the direction where the sun set. "You were that way." I thought about the time it took to walk from my home to get the dark haired one on the second trip. I took Sheppard's hand, lifted it till the watch was showing and pointed. "Twelve…two."

Sky eyes beamed. "Two hours."

I smiled and felt the sun shine through me as we left the clearing of the cliffs and entered the woods. The sun was strong enough that the snow, though cold, was becoming heavy and wet again, sticking as we walked, and shrinking against the ground. Sheppard and McKay spoke about searching for their ship, and when I glared, Sheppard added, "After another day or two." I nodded at their questioning looks. They would be strong enough to try then, if the break between storms held.

We did not go far, and all three of us were watchful, but we never heard a sound other than us, or saw a track we did not make. I found an armful of branches to use, including four that were sturdy and straight enough that I thought maybe I could make another bow, or two. One for Sheppard and one for McKay.

I had watched my father make this very bow – the arrow tips were the only original work, left from the days long gone, days before I had even been born. My father had found a branch, thick but supple, straight as he could find, free of knots. Then he'd rubbed it with fish oil by the fire at night and it had bent willingly; he continued, slowly rubbing more oil and bending, until it was curved into the shape of a waning moon. The sinew thread was strong, and he had wound it between the notches, pulling, until it was tight enough to sing when plucked.

It had been many moons since I had seen it done, but I would try, for them.

"Tell me of this city," I asked, as we walked towards my home. I knew better than to keep them out for too long. "Tell me of these people that will come for you."

Would they be tall, like these two, or smaller, like me? Were there children?

"The city's big, lots of metal, and lights." McKay limped heavier, his eyes now equally lined with pain such as Sheppard's were. "There are men, women, some even competent." He snapped his fingers again, a motion I was beginning to realize he enjoyed. "Teyla!" He smiled as if he had made something into his own. "You'd like Teyla and I bet she'd love you."

"McKay's right," Sheppard said. A smile flitted briefly across his face as he dragged a branch along in the snow. Each of us used a branch to obscure our tracks. "Teyla would probably want to keep you."

"And they would want me to come live with you?"

The hesitation on their faces stole into my heart. Sheppard had bad words on his tongue again. "It's not that, Mawani," he said, when he saw my face. "It's…the city isn't a place you'd want to stay. It's, well, like Rodney said – metal, and it's enclosed, you'd want to be outside, with the trees and flowers, and --"

"The mainland." Sky eyes missed a step and almost fell, the rest of what he was going to say waiting while he floundered. I had the bow hung over a shoulder, one arm full of branches, but I was able to reach for him with my free hand and managed to keep him from falling. He looked both thankful and irritated. "Like Sheppard said, Teyla would help you. Her people would love to have someone like you around."

This Teyla sounded like a very big person, powerful, like the Venerated that gave wise words to all in need. "She would really keep me?"

I saw my home through a break in the trees ahead.

"Not like a pet," explained McKay. "As a friend and you'd be able to stay with her people, and if you wanted, you _could_ probably stay in the city, learn skills. I'm sure Elizabeth would listen to us – maybe you can help Carson? Your healing skills, that's it! You can teach Carson about these herbs; he's always looking to improve his meager abilities."

The satisfaction almost took away the lines of pain from around his mouth.

"Carson – you have mentioned him before. He is a healer, like me?"

Before sky eyes could answer, Sheppard held a hand in the air. I did not know the meaning, but McKay did, his feet freezing from one step to the next. I stilled and listened. A soft wind whispered above, the sun shared the sky with thick clouds. The air was not even cold enough to see my breath. The day of warmth had broken in during the cold, but it would not last.

Sheppard's eyes had narrowed, his brows forming a line across his face. Without speech, he handed me the arrows and took the knife from McKay.

"What'd you see?" hissed sky eyes, almost so quiet I could not hear.

"I thought I saw something, just beyond the tree line." He pointed directly ahead, but if we were to stay in the cover of the woods, we would have to walk around, like the curve of the moon when it had already ruled the sky for cycles and grew weary.

I let the bundle of branches slip quietly from my arm to the ground, thankful for the covering of snow to muffle the noise as they banged against one another. Then, I slipped the bow from my shoulder, drew the arrow and nocked it. I had not practiced, and the feeling of arrow and bow felt familiar in my hands, but like a distant memory. "The white haired monster?"

My heart beat faster.

"It could be our people." McKay gestured helplessly at the cliffs. "Though not registering life signs would be a problem, and if they got caught in the same atmospheric conditions that made us crash --"

He did not finish, and I saw that the words were stuck in his mouth. "I am sure it is not them." I tried to ease his worry.

"Oh, right, which leaves a wraith, that's so much better."

The bow slipped down and I contemplated sky eyes. "You cannot have it both ways. Worry over friends or worry over your life, doing both will make you sick."

"That explains so much," sky eyes muttered. A sharp down motion from Sheppard sent the words from our lips and our bodies to the snow. I had not worn my white cloak; the blue of my tunic would be like a bee on a gnarl's nose, and their black clothes would not hide any better from seeking eyes.

The snow was cold on my legs and I would have asked Sheppard how long he meant for us to remain crouched, but for the sudden movement where he had pointed earlier. A brief thing, but I saw it. The white haired monster had found my home.

The cliffs were supposed to keep me safe. I looked up at them, their green color dull in the light from sun's sky. I felt betrayed by a close friend. "We must kill it," I whispered to Sheppard.

He nodded. Across his eyes, his pain burned. We had not gone far, nor stayed long, but it was their first time up, and now this. He jerked his head at the woods to my right. "I'll outflank him. Be ready to shoot, and make sure you hit him and not me."

Sheppard said the last with a crooked smile but I did not find it so funny.

"What am I supposed to do?" demanded sky eyes.

"Make sure she doesn't miss."

Dark haired Sheppard patted his litter mate reassuringly on the shoulder, before he turned and melted into the trees. I had to scrub my eyes after a moment because he was gone as if he had never existed.

We did not talk then, each of us waiting. I prayed to the God in the sky, keeping it in my heart. I could not bear for the dark haired one to die, or McKay. In so short of a time, he and sky eyes had changed everything, and I knew if they were to die, this time, I would as well. I would not be the last again.

Was not once enough?

I heard screaming break the silence and I lurched up, wet snow clinging to my numb legs. Sheppard ran into the clearing, towards the cliffs, the white haired monster so close that one wrong fall of Sheppard's foot would have him in the monster's hand. "Shoot!" McKay shouted at me, but I was still aiming. One shot, and if it was not true, if it went stray and hit Sheppard – I pulled, not letting my mind dwell on it, lest I never gathered the courage to act, and loosed the arrow, praying harder than I had ever done before, except for when I had held Lillani's sick body against my own.

The white haired monster stopped, suddenly, before the cliffs. My anticipation of his forward run caused the arrow to harmlessly sail in front of the monster's face. Sheppard turned and looked, saw the white haired wraith still standing, then his eyes almost shifted to us, before he stopped them.

"Come on, damn it!" he shouted at the wraith, trying to get it to move forward.

Why did the monster not go after Sheppard?

Instead, the dreadful eyes sought the path of the arrow and found me. It turned away from Sheppard, and the cliffs, and began stalking through the melting snow, murderous intent in the way the hands were curved into claws. I saw Sheppard's face twist in fury when he realized what the wraith was going for, and he ran at the monster. I would not let Sheppard give his life foolishly. I grabbed my bow, another arrow, and ran for the wraith, already stringing it to shoot.

Sky eyes was running with me, though I did not realize it until we were almost upon the monster, my other arrows clenched in his fist.

It seemed every event set in motion collided at one time. Sheppard leapt for the wraith's back, I aimed, but then it spun and grabbed Sheppard, flinging him in front, between the path of my arrow and the monster's body.

I was too near to stop my feet, and the white haired wraith threw Sheppard against me. It was all I could do to keep the arrow tip away from him as we hit the ground, our fall softened by what snow remained.

Sky eyes threw a rock at the monster, shouting, "Three against one, I wouldn't bet on you, you…big green…ugly…life sucking --"

"Don't talk it to death, shoot it!" cried Sheppard.

"With what?" demanded a frantic sky eyes.

The wraith looked momentarily uncertain. Who to kill first? Sheppard, me or sky eyes. When it saw my eyes fixed on its hand, the gloating smile revealed its decision. I was first. The injured hand was shown to me, and when it began to bend towards my chest, I saw my knife sticking from its back where Sheppard had buried it to the hilt in the sickly flesh. By my side was the poisoned arrow, and as it neared, Sheppard made another attempt to thrust the wraith back, kicking with as much strength as he could muster from where he lay on his back, still partially stunned.

The wraith sneered and grabbed Sheppard's leg, twisting it and sending him rolling away from us.

My fingers wrapped around the arrow shaft, and I begged to be true, to thrust hard, to make it stick deep, so even if my life was lost, Sheppard and McKay would be spared. My life for two -- it was good enough. The fear the monster had brought forth in me now turned to anger, to rage that burned hot in my blood and chased away my doubts.

The hand descended and the arrow rose. It hit my chest as I pushed the arrow through flesh. Pain enveloped my arms, legs and eyes. The wraith jerked. Time stilled, as if frozen by the storms, and when it began again, the wraith was by my side, dead. Sky eyes McKay stood over it, his hands clutching my bow.

I swallowed back the dryness of the summer cycles that had come to rest in my mouth and looked at the body.

Two arrows.

There were two arrows sticking from its chest.


	3. Chapter 3

AN: First, sorry this took so long. Second, sorry it's not the end, I tried to fit it all in but it just didn't work. Last, big thanks to my betas, sholio, tazmy, linzi and my hand holding support, shelly!

**Chapter Three**

Before the cycles of cold came, if I had been asked by the birds, "How will you die? Who will mourn you?" my answer would have been, "Can any creature predict their end? But when I pass to the otherworld, the green cliffs will cry, the river will sing, and father sky, maybe, will weep, if he has mind enough to care."

In truth, the answer was that no one would mourn my passing, for there was none to care. I had been the one left behind; the one to mourn, to weep.

I had lived enough to know the capriciousness of life. That one moment, the breath and beat was there, only to be gone in the next. All life is a fragile thing. I could grab the laviola, pull it from the ground, and it would not grow again; the pale plant's blood would dry and harden, the leaves would turn to dust in the wind. The fish that fed me flopped in my hands one moment, frantic to return to the water, but in the next, I would bash it on the head with a rock, and its bones would feed the dirt.

My kind was not so different.

Life could be so easily taken, and it did not sit any better knowing there were now two of my kind to notice my passing if I had died. Sheppard and McKay would have mourned me, I knew, as much as I knew the sun would climb into the sky to chase the moon to the other side of my world, beyond the cliffs and woods. Being mourned, even for a moment, was better than not being noticed at all.

Sky eyes McKay shook like the leaves, wind-tossed. His eyes had lost the heat of anger and now widened. He stared at the body of the white haired monster by my side, then to me, before they drifted past and over my head – to Sheppard.

Sheppard!

I rolled to my side, enough to push myself up, ignoring the trembling in my limbs. He lay in a tumbled heap in the snow, curled on his side. Harsh breaths, drawn in pain, filled the air.

It only took three worried steps till I was kneeling next to him.

During the fight with the white haired wraith, I had been driven into the wet snow; it clung to me like cobwebs, made my clothes stick to my skin and chilled my bones. Or was it my fear for Sheppard? The raspy, wheezing sound made me want to demand of sky eyes to find his people, to bring them now, because I did not trust in my abilities to mend a broken air cavity. _Please, do not be broken_, I begged of the air.

"I killed a wraith with a bow and arrow."

He had moved with me, stood staring down at his litter mate with a mixture of wonder and fear. "McKay, he is hurt," I whispered.

Why did I whisper? Did I fear to wake the dead monster? Or did I fear to speak too loud, scaring Sheppard's soul?

"He's hurt? What…do you realize --"

I rose quickly, turned and took sky eyes' hand. The bow was still held firmly, so tight McKay's knuckles were taut and white, reddened at the tips from the cold and the pressure. "You saved my life, sky eyes," I said. I took the bow, saw the blood staining his pants, the drips dotting into the whitened slush underneath our feet. "But Sheppard is hurt, and so are you."

"Of course he's hurt – he tried to tackle a wraith!" The words came out mixed with irritation and affection. "Wait a minute – I'm hurt? Where?" He looked downwards, checking his hands, his legs. "Oh. Blood. There's blood…_my_ blood." Sky eyes looked at me. "Did I just kill a wraith with a bow and arrow?"

Despite my worry, I smiled. I did not know why, but McKay lightened my heart even when it was heavy, and I could not resist poking at him. "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas." I repeated his strange words from the time before, when we had barely known the surface of each other's mind.

"What? No! This…this I want repeated, sung from the highest spires of Atlantis…" As I reached to ease Sheppard to his back, McKay's excitement waned as his thoughts cleared. "You're teasing me." He tossed his hands in the air before he bent to help. "I finally get flirted with and Sheppard's unconscious."

OoO

After McKay and I struggled to move Sheppard inside, I had a feeling of being back to the beginning, when I had first found them. Sheppard's breathing was harsh, labored, his skin pale and sweaty. He had not woken. Though I could find no injury to his head, he remained deeply asleep.

McKay dropped wearily beside Sheppard, grunting and mumbling from the pain in his leg. The injury had been a deep one, and despite the sickness that had filled it when I first found them, sky eyes had been healing well. Now, the hurried pounding of his feet against ground, even if it was gentled by the snow, and the kicking, had ripped the stitches from the edges of his wound.

As I eased them free of their clothing, sky eyes helping me with Sheppard, I saw that not all of McKay's wound had torn open. A small area in the middle and one of the ends gaped, weepy and red. It was the area in the middle that worried me the most, because it opened down past the surface layers of skin and sky eyes might get wound sick again.

He had swung between talking and moaning. At one point, when I bathed them both with warm gilly water, he squinted at my face and motioned at his own eyes. "You've got wrinkles. You're older." McKay's hand lifted to point at my chest. "You should do something about that."

I tucked my chin to look and saw the oozing marks showing through my tunic. "It took some life from me." I had felt it, a pain like I had never experienced before. "Do I look so different?"

The motion he always seemed to be in quieted and his chin came up. "No, improved, actually. I wouldn't mistake you for some teen aged brat now. You look…oddly dignified. Just…don't cry, okay, not again…"

"A few wrinkles are not enough to make me cry," I said, taking a strip of precious cloth and dipping it into warm water. And I did not believe they made me look dignified.

"Great, really. You don't cry easily, and I'd be an insensate mess by now in your shoes." He sucked a harsh breath down as I dabbed at his wound, clenching his hands into fists and snapped, "Easy, Jesus, that's my leg. I need that in one piece, preferably."

"It is still there, McKay."

"No thanks to you."

He said it crossly but I could see his worry for Sheppard in his eyes, his regret for my wrinkles – McKay was not so angry as he wished me to believe. He wanted me to get mad at him, to say words that would keep him irritated, because that would distract him from the pain he endured and felt. Pain in his leg and in his heart.

"You are as easily read as the sky, McKay," I said evenly, then ducked my head to focus on his wound, and to let him show his emotions to the wall.

We spoke no other words while I re-sewed his wound with sinew, using the last bits I had. I was fairly sure part of that was because of the drop of gilly I gave him before I pierced his skin with needle. I had given it to him to ease the pain, but maybe also, a little, to keep him quiet. Sky eyes could unsettle me more than anything had been able to in many cycles.

Sheppard's eyes responded to being pried open, and when I rubbed my hand on his chest, high in the middle, he moved to stop me. Not so deeply asleep, then. How badly he had been injured, time would tell me.

I had tasks to keep my hands busy, but my mind was not so fortunate. It was hard to push away the memories. I undressed under my blanket, wiped off the wounds on my chest, surprised they were not so deep at all.

Finally, I could avoid it no longer. Sheppard and McKay were resting, cared for, and if their injuries were going to get worse, it was not likely to be in the time I had to deal with the wraith.

I was wearing a new tunic, this one blue, the color to match my spirit. I felt cold, lost, and anxious. I left the warmth of my home, stepped into the snow that crunched under my feet. The sun hid behind the trees and the temperature was falling, causing the melted slush to freeze. I could see the crumpled form on the ground where we had fought it. I had been focused on getting Sheppard inside, not caring to check for certain that it was dead.

I would not have tried to save it even if it had breathed.

But, maybe it had?

Had it laid in the wet snow and begged to its spirits to live? Had it suffered even while I had cared for my kind not more than a few lengths of my body away? Had the poison given it great pain or had it been an instant end? I both wished for it to have lasted and for it to have been quick. Quick, so it did not have time to say its goodbyes, and long, so it had felt the fear and pain it gave to my kind without a thought.

I knew where I would take it. There was a small hole, burrowed into the Jade Cliffs, not more than twenty steps away. I had found it many cycles ago. The small passage only went inward four or five lengths of my body before it ended. The walls glowed weakly, not receiving enough light from the sun to keep away the night. There had been nothing for me in that darkness; I had explored it the one time and never gone back.

If it were true, what McKay had said, that the cliffs had some power over the wraith, then would it not be the best place to put the body of the one we had killed? The other would not be likely to find it, and if by some chance it was not completely dead – did it not have magic power, to take life from my kind with just a touch -- then being entombed in the cliffs could only keep it from ever coming back to harm us.

I looked at it warily. It did not breathe, or move.

Still, it was a white haired monster from my dreams, and I could not shake the feeling that like the terrible things in my night terrors, it could live again, regardless of how dead it seemed to me now. I approached it carefully, poised to act, though all I had was the same knife from before – the one I had never wanted to hold again.

I stared at the white hair, as long as mine. The body was as it had been from before. The arrows stuck out from its chest like saplings from the dirt.

_Thrust hard, don't hold back, aim true._

The pain from being fed upon flared at the edges of my mind. I was not wearing my cloak, and standing in the cold, staring down at the wraith, I felt colder. This was silly. Looking at the wraith did not change the past.

Knowing I needed the arrows, I bent towards the chest to pull them free. Closing my eyes, I grabbed the shaft of the one higher in its chest and pulled as quickly as I could. It slid free from the body with a sickening, surprising ease. The other followed in the same manner. I tossed them to the ground, trying not to linger on the blackened, hardened puddles spreading out from its side, discoloring the snow, staining everything.

With my precious arrow tips salvaged, there was no more reason to put off that which had to be done. I grabbed the uniform straps that were on the monster's shoulders and began to drag the body across the ground. The freezing slush crackled against the stiff leather uniform as it slid, the body rising and falling in irregular jerks as I pulled it over small rocks and debris hidden under the thin layer of snow. The smell of death made my eyes water, and my hands ached from pulling. Fast enough, I backed myself into the cave and dropped to my knees. The cold hardness of the rock and clay and drifted snow burned into my bare skin but there was no keeping my tunic over my legs. The ceiling would not let me stand and I could not bring myself to abandon it this close to the opening. It might be spotted.

I pulled, scooted, and dragged. A lifetime later, the bottoms of my feet hit the end. I paused to breathe, trying to not look at the face staring at me, the mouth twisted up into a permanent grin. The need to get away overwhelmed me, but to leave, I had to crawl over the monster. There was no room to stand or to walk hunched to the side; I could only go over. Still, I pushed up as far as I could, until the rough rock pressed down against my back, scraping skin as I tried to keep as much distance between our bodies.

In the stifling darkness, it was too easy for my mind to imagine life suddenly returning to the white haired monster. Imagining the hand shooting up towards my chest while I hovered over it, unable to escape. The fear made me dizzy. Even when I was past, and down on my hands and knees, moving away for good, the thought that the hand would reach for my feet and pull me towards it, made me hurry forward, so fast I added more scrapes and bruises along the bones that ran down the middle of my back.

I did not care – I only wanted out.

OoO

Later, safely back inside my home, the scrapes nothing more than stings of the recent past, I could not settle. I drifted between caring for Sheppard and McKay, tending the fire, fixing a stew of bear root and salted fish. The walls that had once been reassuring, now pressed in towards me, threatening. Singing. _Leave, _they begged.

Why?

Because at least one more white haired wraith was out there – the one that had fed on its companion, the one that was not injured and weak, and would assuredly kill one or more of us.

The bow and arrows were against the wall, mocking me. It had worked once, but that wraith had been far less than the other would be. Even with the weapon, we had almost been killed. My hand stole to the feeding mark on my chest, the tips of my fingers slid across the scabbing scars. I had almost died. After all these cycles, the end had been so near I could still taste it on my tongue.

Would we survive the other if it found us?

The answer was painful.

_Not without help._

Dark haired Sheppard had said their people would come for them. Sky eyes had said they'd fallen from the night sky in a spaceship. If these others were to find Sheppard and McKay, they would need to be with their ship. Else, was it not like finding a small pebble in a large stream? Three small beings in one large world; had I not seen for myself that the lands stretched beyond where my legs could take me?

I sat on the crate by the fire, shivered from the warmth of the river rock battling with the chill in my soul. Night sky had draped a cloak of darkness above me and only the soft green glow of my walls and the dancing sprites of orange, yellow and red filled my eyes.

I was perched on the cusp of a breaking floe of ice, precarious in the thoughts racing through my mind. Sheppard and McKay's wounds had been aggravated, but if Sheppard's air cavity had not been breeched, if McKay's wound stayed well through the night…if…then I had two paths before me. Both could end in my death, in their death, but only one might end in salvation for the two.

They needed their people. Their healer. Their city in the sea.

As the fire burned my face, I hung my head, and wept. Softly, silently, for my people, my baby -- for my world, because I knew it was lost to me.

I knew I would help my males find their ship, and pray their people came before the storms. I knew if they asked – if they let me – I would go with them, to the stars, to the sky, and leave my world behind. Leave the ghosts in the dust. Leave the memories I had lost and gained and only wished to forget again.

My arms slipped around my knees and I hugged myself tight, wishing suddenly they had never came. That I had never found them on the ground and brought them here. It had been eleven turns of night and day, and yet, in that time I had gained my people back, if only in my mind, just to feel the loss again, as if it were only a cycle away instead of the many more that I could count on my hands and feet…I had remembered the face that belonged to the picture, and the one that had given me that face. I had remembered the ghosts, and the monsters.

It was not fair that the monsters returned to life and the ghosts did not. Why not the ghosts, why not the laughing children that danced with me at my binding? Why not my father, that had kissed me softly and whispered, _"Mawani, daughter of Kinani and Soham, blessed by father rock and mother river, I give to Leom, strong in courage and tall in heart."_

The monster's ships had screamed from the sky, deadly insects swarming on my people. The twilight ground to a stop, and the cries of many rose to fill the air. I had stood before the venerated, with Leom by my side, in my dress of cotton, rich and yellow, bright and full of the promise of sun sky. My father had turned, to calm the scared, but there was no calming my people when bright stars fell from the sky and made our world burn.

I remembered standing frozen in the circle, the gusts of wind blowing smoke into my eyes – remembered the pink petals fluttering to my feet, torn free from the binding wreath woven in my hair.

Torn from me, like my people had been.

"_Leom, take Mawani to the chest, hide her!"_

"_No, father! I will not leave you!"_

I had been a good daughter, obedient in all things, other than lying with Leom the day before our binding. Father had only to look upon me with the face I remembered well from my days of running with my hair bound in leather. I let Leom pull me away, let him push me into the wooden chest, stared frightened into his face.

With gentle, warm hands, calloused from working the tools of the ground, Leom clasped my cheeks and drew my face into a kiss. The shouts of terror, the roaring of roofs burning in the tortured background, filled me up as he claimed my lips and pushed me down.

"_Do not leave, Mawani. I am going to help your father. You must stay hidden!"_

I did not leave. Not even when I had to relieve myself. I stayed, felt the warmth of it run down my legs, and endured the helplessness that enclosed me in its horrible embrace. Time passed until I grew brave enough, desperate enough, to open the lid; there was nothing left. The home I was in had been mostly of stone, but the roof of branches and grass was gone. The meeting circle was scoured to nothing but rock and coal. The well, filled with broken parts of the lives we had led.

My father was gone. Leom was gone. I had done what Leom said. I did not leave – but they had left me.

I was alone.

Days I had wandered in the ruins. It was not until I had grown ill and realized I had missed my time of women's blood that I knew I would not be alone for much longer. It was what pushed the sorrow away, what drove my sadness into dust, and forced my feet to walk towards safety. If not for Lilani, I would have died there, just as broken as the remnants of my world.

By the time Lilani left me, her spirit uniting with the father she had never known, numbness stole my mind and I had lived in a place where I had no past.

Wiping away the wetness from my cheeks, I stole a glance at the sleeping males, and wished again to be in that place. No past, no future – just the day and night sky, the turns of the endless cycles, and the work to keep my hands busy and my mind empty.

Sheppard stirred, a bare arm slipping free of the blanket. His breath grew faster, pained. I held still, afraid for him to wake, afraid for him not to. When his eyes blinked away his sleep and focused on me, I stood, pushing away the depths of my misery.

"McKay?" He tried to turn enough to see sky eyes, but the movement pulled on his broken bone, and he stopped quickly, a picture of frustration flickering across his face for only a blink of time. "Is he all right?"

"His wound opened again, but he is resting." I did not speak of my worry about the sickness returning. Sometimes, putting words to thought made them come true. "How do you feel?" I asked, keeping my voice soft so that I would not wake sky eyes.

His mouth twisted into a grimace. "Like a wraith tossed me around."

"Then you feel as you should." I pulled away the blanket, aware that he was watching me. "Breathe." I placed my hands flat over the injured bone.

"It's not worse."

"Then breathe."

Those eyes of many colors grew stormy. "You know, you're more annoying than --"

I pushed slightly upwards, away from the air cavity, to see if the bone gave. He yelped and stopped talking, and the bone bent. Broken again, but when I laid my ear against his chest, his thick hair tickling my face, I could hear no sounds that would have meant the air cavity was punctured. I pulled away and readjusted the blanket, staring at him solemnly. "You are very blessed, Sheppard."

He did not look like he believed it. "Really?" he drawled. "Then someone needs to tell the big guy upstairs because I seem to get into a lot of deep sh --" he stopped, frowned at me, "never mind. Look, I'm a little vague on how it all ended out there." He tried again to glance at sleeping sky eyes, this time only moving his head. "I'm guessing we won. Tell me it's dead?"

I curled my feet underneath me, sat by his side and pulled his hand, clasping it between mine to feel his life's beat. "We won."

The skin on his forehead bunched as he studied me closely. His other hand reached for my face, brushed stray hair behind my ear. Warm fingers traced along the edges of my eye, across new wrinkles. "I'm sorry."

McKay had told me I now looked dignified instead of a teen-aged girl. He'd told me it was a good thing, that it was not that much. The wraith had only begun to feed when he had shot it with the second arrow; pushed it away from me with his foot. I had told sky eyes a few wrinkles were not enough to make me cry. I had not lied – it was not the wrinkles that broke me. It was imagining Leom aged to an old man. My father. My mother.

Imagining strong, dark haired Sheppard and the constantly moving and talking sky eyes McKay.

No living thing deserved that.

I had felt my face. The changes were small, nothing more than a few cycles would have given me. I would not have had another day of sun and night sky if the poison had failed to work.

A few years for a lifetime.

"No," I whispered, pulling his hand away. "I am sorry. I should have looked for this ship of yours, should have tried to find your things. I had been so eager to see another of my kind that I did not stop and think about why you were here, and what had brought you to me."

There was a gentleness to Sheppard, a part of his soul that peeked through the edges of his eyes. I had seen glimpses when he had soothed sky eyes through the aftermath of night terrors, and I saw it now. He did not blame me for being single-minded, though I blamed myself.

"You saved our lives."

"Only for you to die." Because that was what would happen if the other wraith found us. I pulled back, retreating, and made an excuse to put fresh logs on the fire. He stayed quiet, watching me. I lingered longer than I had to, bending over the river rock. The heat suffused my cheeks, making them burn again. I put a log end down in the ashes and let it tip from my hand and fall forward into the fire.

The bark hissed, crackled, the flames splitting around the bulk of the wood. Staring mesmerized, I knew it would only be a short time before the fire licked at the sides, rejoined over the top, and turned the log to burnt coal. "If we do not find your ship, your people will not find you. You will die, like this log in the flame." I breathed deep, feeling the sharp tang of wood smoke seep into my air cavities.

"You're beginning to sound like McKay," he muttered.

When I looked at him, Sheppard was still on his back, staring at the glowing bricks arching over his head. Did he see the danger lying around us? "Sky eyes is wise," I said.

Night held the land in a tight fist and tiredness washed over me.

Morning had held such promise – now it was like water on a hot river rock, gone in a puff of smoke, creeping to the sky to rejoin the cycle of life, where hope and heartache mixed and fell like random drops of rain.

Why did it seem like my sky dropped more pain than promise?

"_Sky eyes_ is paranoid."

Sheppard's tone was as dry as the end of the summer cycles. "He cares for you." I did not mean to say it out loud – I knew these two males did not openly say words of affection. They were not like my people, where a reason to share feeling was pulled from the sky. If the sun had been especially bright, or the stars loomed clear and close overhead, as to seem like you could touch them with only a reach of a finger, we had been eager to laugh, hug and call, "I love you!"

Life was meant to be sung, felt, embraced.

Sighing, I slipped quietly to the wall, away from where the two males were, pulling free the scraps of fur and root thread. They were not my people, but they were of my kind. I would sing their feelings for them if I must, even if I kept the song in my heart.

"Yeah…" Sheppard looked warily at the sleeping sky eyes. "I know." His voice had dropped again, husky and soft, as reluctant as the ice. "Funny, took traveling to another galaxy to find a family." He coughed, grimaced, and fought to keep from coughing again. I left my supplies by my bed and took a flask of water to Sheppard.

"Drink," I soothed. The effort made his eyes heavy. "Rest, Sheppard. We will make plans to find your ship when the sun returns. You will not lose your family, I promise."

His nod was clumsy.

By the time I had knelt by sky eyes and prodded him into waking enough to drink, Sheppard was fast asleep.

McKay's skin was warm, but he came up long enough to drink, before returning to his rest, as well. I checked his wound and was relieved to find it felt the same temperature as the rest of his leg. I hoped it was only the heat of my home, their blankets, and the break in the terrible cold outside, making him feel warm to my touch. They must recover, or I would have to search for a ship I would not recognize, to try and save them.

I gathered their discarded clothing from earlier, and settled on my mattress. If we would begin to search, they would need to be better dressed. I took out the scraps and began the long process of patching the holes in their clothing with gnarl hide before working on fur coverings.

OoO

It was the noise of feet on the floor that woke me. The walls were dimmed, and a weak pale light drifted down from the ceiling. The morning chill stung my face and I fought against the urge to burrow under my blanket.

I sat reluctantly, keeping the blanket wrapped as tightly as I could, and found Sheppard bending at the wood pile, piling logs in his hands, before turning towards the hearth. He saw me watching him and grinned. "Did I wake you?"

"You should be in bed," I scolded.

"I should be up." He began to lay the logs over the coals from last night's fire. "We didn't post a watch last night. There's another wraith out there that doesn't care how hurt we are. Yesterday proved we need to be careful."

"You risk injuring your air cavity." My legs were folded together, the skin warm, and I made no move to leave my bed, or my blanket.

"I'm fine." When he turned away from the fire, I could not keep from staring at the deep bruises on his chest, only hidden by the thick, curly black hair in the middle that tapered down to the waist of his pants. "You did that?" He nudged his head towards their pile of mended clothing.

I nodded. "We will need to be warm." Last night it had seemed as obvious as the wall in front of me, that we must leave, seek their ship. But at the same time, with morning light casting away the shadows, I was afraid. I knew the trip was a leap off the cliff. There was no going back once we jumped. The storms would come, the wraith that still lived would be hunting us – what if sky eyes could not fix their ship? What if we did not find it?

The saying that those that are in your thoughts, know, and come, seemed true, because even as my mind considered McKay, the male groaned, rolled to his back and blinked fuzzily at the ceiling. "I keep thinking this is a nightmare and I'll wake up back on Atlantis." His face turned to the side, locking onto Sheppard. "Why couldn't this just be a bad dream?"

"Because we're not that lucky, McKay."

"You're telling me." He sat, wincing from the pain caused by his motion. "Ow!"

Sheppard's worried eyes met mine. "Can he walk on it?"

"_He's_ right here."

I shrugged heavy shoulders. "If I bind it tightly, and he is careful, but it is as risky as you walking with a broken bone." I was not so easy to steer away as Sheppard wished. But there was little hope if we stayed, and looking at him, I regretted bringing up his infirmity. He was well aware of his injury and the danger the trip held. The blanket slid to my legs and I stood. "There is food to pack, supplies we will need. There is a rest between storms, usually a few turns of night and day, so we should leave soon."

"What?" McKay's demand came with the edge of surprise. "Leave – where are we going?"

Sheppard's steps were careful; he kept his arm by the broken bone bent and still to limit any pulling. He moved to the pile of clothing and knelt to lift McKay's, tossing it to sky eyes on the bed. "Get dressed – we're going Jumper hunting."

"Jumper hunting?" He repeated, still trying to understand. He shook out his pants, slipped free of the blanket and moaned with more waves of pain. "You mean – what if—oh…"

"What'd you give him last night?"

I frowned. "His jumbled speech is not my doing."

McKay reached for Sheppard's hand, pulled himself up and finished fastening his pants. "I'm not jumbled, God. It's cold, my leg feels like a hot poker is stuck in it, and you spring the news on me that we're going to be hiking through the woods…" he looked superciliously at the door, "the _frozen_ woods, to find the Jumper, when it's probably nothing more than scrap metal – and let's not forget the wraith that's stalking around out there." With an exasperated huff of air, he tugged his shirt over his head. "It's warm in here, Colonel. Food, fire, blankets – it's cold death waiting out there and excuse me for not being fast enough to process the stupidity of this plan!"

"I thought you wished to find your ship?" McKay was like the clouds. Calm one moment, stormy the next. "You want to see your Carson again?"

His hands went up, agitated. "That was before our run-in with…" he paused and narrowed his eyes at Sheppard.

"Larry."

McKay snorted, shook his head, and continued, "…with Larry. Going out in this weather, with only a bow and arrow, knife and the clothes on our backs, is an incredibly suicidal idea."

"But you said the cliffs have magical properties – your people will not find my home. They might come and leave, thinking you are gone to the otherworld. Is that what you wish? Staying here is dangerous." I had to make sky eyes understand. I did not want for them this solitary life. I did not want the remaining monster to find them. "_It_ found us; it is only a matter of days till the one still living does, also."

Sky eyes stood barefoot on the straw mattress, shivered, and limped towards the fire, seeming lost in his thoughts. "I didn't specifically say the cliffs would keep our people from finding us…but you're right. We didn't pick up life signs when we came out of the 'gate…it could be the same ions in the atmosphere that brought us down, _or_ an intrinsic property with the cliffs. Oddly enough, local myth and legend usually is a warped version of truth. Without my scanner, I can't be sure --"

"McKay, can you make it," interrupted Sheppard sharply.

"No," he snapped. "I've got a hole in my leg, Sheppard." He looked at me, saw into my heart, and read my worry and fear. "But I'll do it anyway." He turned from me, rubbed cold hands over the flames and pretended he had not seen my emotions.

I pretended I had not let them show.

Like the movements of the small insects in the ground before the cycles of cold arrived, we got ready. I made us a thick breakfast of white weed, giving both males extra and insisting they eat it all. McKay had curled his lips and said thanks in a way that I was sure meant exactly the opposite. Sheppard elbowed his litter mate, causing an outraged squawk.

Out of habit, I cleaned the bowls, the kettle, though I had the feeling I would not return. Either we would die in the woods, or their people would come and take me away. While Sheppard and McKay picked from the scraps of fur I had sewn into covers for our hands and heads, I put everything in a place. The bow was ready, the arrows – I had never had the chance to make them one of their own.

My knife was tucked in Sheppard's pants.

I opened the door and scooped snow, returning to the hearth. Using a clay jar and another log, I pushed a couple of the larger coals inside to take with us. I could use them to start a new fire if we needed. Then, I sprinkled the snow over the burning logs. The flames hissed and spattered. It took four full scoops to make the fire die, and I added a fifth to be sure, though there was not anywhere for the flames to go even if they managed to nurse an ember. I had built a large hearth, made to keep my home safe, and the fire contained.

My satchel was full of preserved fish, cakes of white weed that I had baked last night on the river rock, and some healing herbs and laviola. On sky eyes' back was a bag full of dry wood and straw, on Sheppard's, blankets to keep us warm.

It was two of their hours to the place where I had found them, but how far had they wandered from their spaceship? Had it been a day, or two?

With their injuries, I did not think it possible to be more than that.

They stood by the door, ready, tired and pale. Injured, but prepared. I had my fur cloak on, my boots, the fur coverings in my hands for when I walked outside. I swallowed back the thickness in my throat, the salt in my eyes.

Sheppard ducked his head, considered me and the door. "We'll just…be outside," he said huskily. "Come on, McKay." He tugged sky eyes with him.

"What? "

"Just move..."

They were through the door, their voices fading to murmurs in the air, and I was alone in my home for the first time since I had found them. I walked without thought to the chest, knelt and opened the lid. The picture was behind, tucked out of sight, and I pulled it forward, holding the image in my mind. With shaking fingers, I traced the soft curves of features I had shaded with coal. "Good bye," I whispered. Without giving my heart time to reconsider, I rolled it quickly, and placed it in the chest, shutting the lid on the memories. "This is where you belong, Lilani – with the ghosts."

I stood, the swing of the satchel thumping against my belly. Maybe the dust would reclaim my home. Maybe some day I would return, and walk in the dust.

It was enough to know it would always be in my mind, in my dreams, and that I had lived here. I walked to the door, pulled open the latch, and stepped into the uncertainty of my future.

OoO

"This is where you found us?"

I nodded, standing in the middle of the small clearing. McKay looked as if he thought I could not be sure, but I had lived many cycles in the woods. I had marks to guide my way, small changes in the trees and ground that I used to remember the way. "Here," I pointed at the nearest slender birch, "the cuts on the bark I made two cycles ago. A mother gnarl made her den in this place and I found the baby. I had to return many days to be sure it had not been abandoned."

McKay still looked unconvinced, hunched in his barely fitting wrap of fur scraps, patched together like the clouds of the sky.

"She knows her way, McKay. So, we made it this far, but which way did we come from…"

Sheppard spoke the last as a question but did not wait for an answer, even if I had one to give. He stepped to the edge, where grass met trees, though all that could be seen through the small layer of stubborn snow were the tips of sun-yellowed weeds. The temperatures were not as warm as the day before, when we had walked through the melting snow and looked for branches to form bows. The same day that we had killed the white haired monster, setting us on this course that I thought was foolish, dangerous, and the only one that would save our lives.

We had not walked easily through the woods to this clearing. Sheppard had us walk here in a form much like that of the Fens when they flew high above, leaving before the cold arrived: their venerated in front, the others following to the side and behind. We watched the woods while we moved as quietly as we could, always looking for any sign of the other wraith. My soft fur boots could move lightly over the frozen crust without breaking through, but their heavier boots, black as the night sky, broke through, leaving marks we could not hide and noise that could be heard for too many steps away.

"Fine, even if this is the clearing, it helps us how?" McKay demanded, leaning heavily on his good leg. The cold had driven a ruddiness into his cheeks, but it only accentuated the pallor in his skin.

Sheppard had his face turned away from sky eyes, and if I had not watched him for all these turns of night and day before, I would have believed he was not paying attention. I did know him though, and knew that he was thinking two steps ahead of me, already considering things in the future that I did not know. His eyes were focused outward, white mists of air curling out from his lips. "Think, McKay – would we have left the ship without anything? Guns, medkit, food?" He stepped into the woods, knelt and ran his hands over a lumpy rise in the blanket of snow. With a suddenness that surprised both me and sky eyes, he punched through the crust, grinned, and pulled up a black object, no bigger than his hand, but oddly shaped.

"That's mine," McKay said, surprised and territorial. He limped over, took it from Sheppard and stared at it mystified. "We dropped our supplies." Sky eyes snapped the fingers on his free hand. "Bread crumbs through the forest, it'll lead us to the Jumper!"

I struggled to follow. "You used your supplies to lay a trail back to your ship? Like my markers in the woods?" It seemed to me a silly idea, losing these items in the forest that they had placed such faith in. "Is that one of these guns you spoke of? Would it not have been better to scratch the bark, or pile branches, than leave your important supplies behind?"

McKay's eyes lifted to the sky. When he returned them to me, I felt like a child standing before my mother. "It wasn't intentional. We weren't exactly compos mentis, Mawani – Sheppard probably wasn't even conscious, which means I was dragging him along. On a good day, that would leave me floundering, but add wounded, it's a miracle we made it at all."

"Why did you not simply stay with your ship?" If their people had already come, and gone…

"Oh, I don't know," McKay thrust the black object at Sheppard, "because we'd be dead, maybe. Little things like the wraith knew we'd gone down, and of course, the being wounded…"

Sheppard took a frustrated breath. "Knock it off, McKay. We don't know what we were thinking, for all we know, there might not be anything left but a burnt frame – I'm blank from the time we started down into the atmosphere, and you're not much better. We've got to focus on finding the ship."

There were still many questions in my mind, but I pushed them aside, and stepped closer to Sheppard. "You came that way. The warm temperatures have melted the snow, made it easier to find odd shapes lying underneath. If we walk with arms-length between us, we can find these discarded supplies, but if you came far…if you did not have much in your arms, it will not help so much as you wish."

"Do I sound that depressing when I do that to you?" McKay demanded, looking at Sheppard.

Sheppard's mouth twisted crookedly and he nodded. "See, pessimism's a real downer."

"Huh, I never knew." McKay joined up with Sheppard and they started moving forward, spreading to the side, leaving enough room that they could carefully scan the ground between them.

I had the feeling I had just missed currents in the water and stood, confused, on the cusp of the clearing. These males were very odd at times. Shrugging my satchel to relieve a sore spot on my shoulder, I walked briskly to catch up, moving to the farthest edge away from McKay.

We walked like that for many of their hours. We found two more objects that they confirmed were guns. Both of these were longer, larger. They looked as if they were capable of doing much damage. Sheppard tried all three, but only two would fire; first, the small gun boomed, then the sharp, fast rapping of noise filling the air around us from the larger weapon. I thought the sound would draw the white haired wraith to us, but Sheppard insisted they had to know what worked and what did not.

The temperature was falling. I began to shiver under my tunic and fur; the air crept up underneath the hem of my clothes, wrapping around my bare skin. Clouds, heavy and gray, had slipped overhead with a quickness that reminded me of water released from a blockage in a stream. "A storm is coming," I warned Sheppard.

I had found the latest item. Progress was slow, and sometimes we moved so far forward without finding anything that I was sure we had lost the trail. Or wondered if we had gone so far that maybe McKay had not begun to drop items. When he had first set out from the ship, dragging Sheppard and their things, he must have had enough clarity of thought to gather these things together. He would not have dropped supplies in the beginning of his journey.

He would have had to grow weary and confused first.

We would eventually reach the moment where he had tired enough to start shedding objects, and from that point on, we would be searching without a trail for their ship.

Sheppard took the black bag, frowned at the sky. "How long till it hits?"

Predicting the storms was like predicting the motion of a pebble in the river. I could say it would roll downward, but would it be tossed to the side, or down the middle of the riverbed, I could not guess. I had not thought another would arrive for another turn of night and day.

"It could be as soon as the sun falling behind the trees," I told him. "Or when the moon will have filled the sky, if not for the clouds." I did not think it would hold off much past that point.

"So we need to find shelter soon," he surmised.

McKay spun around, almost falling as he lost his balance, his wounded leg faltering for a moment. He gestured at the slender willows stretching upwards. This part of the forest lacked the thick evergreens that grew north of the river. Here, it was like walking through a ground littered with poles rising straight to the sky, bare of leaves, their branches like scraggly arms curved upwards. "Where? Did I miss something, because I'm not seeing anything even remotely shelter-like."

"We've got one of our bags. We've got supplies now." Sheppard stared pointedly at McKay. "Depressing, remember? The good news, we haven't seen any sign of the wraith. Odds are, the dart crashed away from us, and that means time's on our side."

"That's the best you can come up with?"

Sheppard squinted into the darkening woods ahead. "It's better than nothing."

"Did you hear the gusts of wind during that last storm? A tent isn't going to cut it, Colonel. We need a building, or a cave. Something sturdier than nylon, preferably man-made, and we need it yesterday."

"Will your ship do?" I asked.

Sky eyes turned on me with surprise; Sheppard, with hope tempered by caution. I had been scanning the trees while they talked; their back and forth often left me confused. It was then that I had spotted it – the missing tree tops, so easily overlooked by anyone not used to having walked amongst the forest in full bloom. I could see it now, a path in the air above our heads, where the tops of the trees were broken. "Look." I gestured above us, then off to the side. "Follow the trees that are smaller than the others."

"Son of a bitch," breathed Sheppard, a broad grin replacing the guarded look from before.

McKay craned his neck, tracked the line and returned Sheppard's grin ten-fold. "Follow the yellow brick road." He stepped forward, only for his leg to collapse, and send him falling to the ground.

Before I could move, Sheppard was there. "Easy, McKay…take it easy." He got his hands under sky eyes' arms and helped him stand.

"Oh, God, pain bad. Remember that."

"Like you'd let me forget?"

McKay lurched forward and I shook off my slowness. I took his other arm from Sheppard, smiling at him when he thanked me with his eyes. "We need to get you both to shelter." I had not missed the carefulness of Sheppard's movements, or how shallow his breaths were. The mist that rose from his mouth was far less than that coming from sky eyes and myself.

I had seen animals do the same. Deep breaths hurt with broken bones over the air cavities; shallow breaths offered less pain, but did not clear out the cavities, did not stretch them like they should, and sometimes animals would fall sick after taking shallow breaths for too long. The same sickness that had clogged Lilani's chest and taken her from me.

"Lead the way," offered Sheppard. "You can see the differences better than we can."

I nodded, knowing his words were true.

OoO

The sheared treetops soon gave way to scorched trunks and devastation easily followed by even sky eyes. The sun had dipped behind the clouds so that the grey pall had given way to a deeper darkness. Flakes spit down, small and fitful; gusts of wind ruffled the fur against my neck.

My worry was as big as the cliffs when suddenly, it was there, a large silver fish out of water. I felt my feet stop, my heart pause. "It is beautiful," I whispered.

Sheppard chuckled. "You should have seen it before we crashed."

"Yes, amazing how the lack of scorching, bending and breaking adds to the effect," cracked McKay.

They did not understand. It was like legend walking from myth, appearing in front of me. Like a star dropping at my feet and letting me hold it – I let go of sky eyes and stepped near enough to touch. "Can I?" I asked, looking over my shoulder at them. The wind rocked my body, the snow settled on my cloak.

"Go ahead," Sheppard said. His eyes shared my excitement.

The storm raged around me, the trees howled, but I was in a bubble, with nothing but magic in the moment of touching this ship that had flown in the night sky, danced with the stars. My fingertips brushed metal both cold and warm and I felt for sure I was touching life. My feet took me forward and I leaned in, pressed my body against the curves. "You have seen the unseeable. You have flown with the birds." I swallowed back my emotion. "You have been steered by the ghosts."

"Freezing here."

"See if you can get the hatch open. I'll watch over her."

My bubble burst and I stepped away, feeling odd. "This is yours?" How could man own such majesty?

He made a face. "Maybe borrowed is a better term."

Understanding flooded through my bones. Of course. They were simply the guardians to this brave spaceflyer. "Can it be fixed? Can sky eyes mend its wounds?"

"Look, Mawani – I know this is, well, unusual for you, but as much as the Jumpers have a special spot…" Sheppard drifted off, his eyebrows drawing together. "You know what, never mind, maybe you're right. Come on, let's --"

"Got it! Yes! " Sky eyes' cry floated to us on the wind, and softer came, "I really can fix anything."

Sheppard's lips curved. "- go see how McKay's doing."

I smiled. "He is doing well, I believe."

OoO

If seeing the outside had been wondrous, seeing the inside was even more so. The spaceflyer was made of materials I had never touched before and now found myself surrounded by. Chairs with cushions that were not made from cloth and straw. There were so many things, everywhere, and I did not know what they were. Doors led into a front, more broken and damaged than the outside.

Sheppard had approached one of those chairs. He had fallen into himself, and he reminded me of what I had felt outside in the woods when I had touched the surface of the ship's body. But on his face, I read worry, sorrow and pain. The see-through material that had covered the surface in front of the chairs was broken, and it looked to me like ice that had been too weak to stand the weight of an animal; cracks traveled outward, crooked and ugly. Blood was on the odd shaped wall, almost like a table. Sheppard's blood, I realized, feeling a thickness in my throat again.

"Now I know how my leg got like this," sky eyes said, his voice sounding slightly sick and weak.

I followed his eyes and saw a thick branch, punched through the ice-like surface and angled down to the other chair. There was so much blood that I reached for it, feeling the dried, hard puddles, awed that it was not their deathbed. I looked to both and said, "You lived through such a thing? How is that possible?" The damage to their spaceship was great, to their bodies, how could it have not snatched them to the otherworld?

Before McKay could speak, the storm arrived in full fury, whipping into the ship. The branch groaned and moved; the ice shield cracked more, sounding like the breaks on the river when the summer cycle arrived and stole the land from its hibernating sleep. The ice would moan through the night and sometimes, it made a sound like the weapon Sheppard had fired, echoing into the air, before being whisked away in the fast flowing water.

"Can you restore emergency power from the rear?" Sheppard asked, looking over at McKay.

Sky eyes pushed me to the side, hopped through the doors. "Yes, if there are any crystals still in one piece."

"Crystals?" The word felt strange on my tongue, but beautiful, like the fragile flowers emerging from their buds.

"Come on." Sheppard tugged me back. "We need to seal the cockpit if we're going to stay warm."

When we were through, he touched the wall and another set of doors slid between us and the front. They shrieked like the storms and could not close all the way. Sheppard shrugged and said, "Good enough," before guiding me to the long raised bed against the wall.

I knew this was the time to watch, and be quiet. They were immersed in their world and I knew they were fighting to keep us alive. I stared towards the larger door that sky eyes had closed once we were inside, the one they had called a hatch, and imagined the dark forest beyond.

"Take this. If anything tries to come through either door, you should be armed."

Sheppard thrust the small black object in my hand. It was cold and heavy. I held it awkwardly and looked to him for words to explain. He smiled grimly and pointed to a button on the side. "That's the safety, leave it on. When you're ready to shoot, push it in. You point this --" he clasped my hand and fitted my fingers around the thicker end, then pointed the narrower end at the closed doors, " – at what you want to shoot. Pull the trigger," he moved one of my fingers to loop around a thin curved part, "and pray."

"Pray?"

McKay snorted. "Out of all that, she asks what pray means."

"If you can shoot a bow and arrow, she can shoot a 9 mil."

"I'm sure she can shoot it, I just don't want to be the one she hits." Sky eyes pulled open a panel and I could see there were more ice-like pieces inside. He seemed to go through them with as little care as I used when cleaning my wooden bowls.

Sheppard looked sideways at me. "You won't hit McKay, right?"

I shook my head. "Just white haired monsters," I promised. I did not bother to mention I knew what pray meant.

He nodded, satisfied, then seemed to think about it more. He gave me a second glance. "Just…don't point that end at us, ever, okay?" I lifted the weapon and looked down the barrel, curious. Sheppard jerked forward, grabbed and pushed it down and away, back towards the rear doors. "Don't do that." He looked whiter than before.

Maybe I should give it back? If this thing was that dangerous, I did not wish to hold it. I almost did, but I saw the gray lying underneath Sheppard's skin, the lines of hidden pain creeping from his eyes and mouth. I swallowed back my fear and placed it gently on my knees, the narrow end facing the metal door. "Do not point at you, or me, only white haired monsters, and pull the…trigger. I understand."

"See, easier than teaching you, Rodney."

"Har har har, you slay me."

They worked together, then, arguing and fussing over the opened panels of ice. There were times when sky eyes shouted in triumph, only for the ship to whine and then sky eyes' face would fall.

After another disappointment, Sheppard patted McKay on his shoulder, moving his body carefully. "Keep working, you can do it – besides, if you don't, we die."

"Stop with the imminent death." Sky eyes dropped his attention from the panels to Sheppard, his expression exasperated. "I have no idea where you came up with that flawed psychology, but let me assure you, all previous instances were purely coincidental."

Sheppard grinned, holding the tools that sky eyes had given him. "I don't believe in coincidences."

I huddled in my furs, shivering. I was about to suggest they stop arguing and we build a fire on the floor, when McKay suddenly shouted again, but this time his cry was followed by sun lighting the darkness that had only been broken by the small light Sheppard had set on the long bed next to me. I had gaped in wonder at it when he had pulled it free from their supplies, sure that they had snatched part of the sun and trapped it in the thin tube, but now…how did they do this?

The spaceflyer had many secrets.

"Now we won't become humansicles." McKay turned to Sheppard and me, smiling widely. "See," he said happily. "Fix anything."

"Get us spaceworthy, then," challenged Sheppard.

His face scrunched. "With _parts_."

"Always an excuse, buddy." Sheppard's words seemed the opposite of the warmth in his eyes, and I waited for sky eyes to return words, that in any of my people, would have been insulting, but suddenly Sheppard's legs crumpled and he stumbled back.

I dropped the weapon and caught him, his motion driving both of us back into the bed. "Sheppard!"

"Colonel?"

"Help me, McKay." I tried not to move his body much. Sky eyes and I got him stretched out where I had been sitting moments before. I put my cheek over his mouth and felt the soft puff of air. "He is breathing," I said. McKay seemed to go limp, and slumped against the other wall, sliding down into the long bed on that side of the ship.

I felt Sheppard's forehead, sucked in a quick breath at the heat that met my skin. Kneeling, I pulled away the layers of his patched outer cloak and shirt, till I was down to his bare chest. Afraid of what I would hear, I pressed my ear against his skin. The heat burned into my face and the crackles I heard on the side where his broken bone lay made my heart stumble.

Not that. Not the same sickness that had claimed Lilani. It was not fair. I pulled away from Sheppard, tucked his clothes back into place, and turned to sky eyes. "Can your Carson cure a clogged chest?" I demanded, angry. I had no herb to cure the crackles.

"Clogged chest?" sky eyes repeated dumbly. "What…" he seemed to slow his tongue to match his thoughts. "Explain using words I can actually _understand_. What's wrong with him?"

I frowned at him. Sky eyes was not as slow as the gnarls. He was smart, like the night predators. "His air cavities are sick, they crackle. Clogged chest."

His eyes of blue widened with understanding. "Pneumonia?" He stood with too much speed, stumbled on his bad leg. "Damn it!" Then he was pulling himself towards the back and opening a small door near the ceiling. A bag came falling on his head, causing him to yelp with surprise. Finally, he glared at me. "A little help! Before I kill myself trying to save his life, _again_."

He was confusing me, with his rapid speech and actions, but I moved to him, took the bag and followed him back to Sheppard's side.

"Why didn't I think of this earlier --" He took the bag from me and threw it on the floor, opening it and rummaging through the things inside. I peered in and found myself lost again in how strange their supplies were. I had never seen the like in my life, not before the time of the white haired monsters, nor after. "Here!" He held up a thin shaped object, pleased, and by the look he gave me, sky eyes thought I should be, also.

"What is it?" I felt as stupid as the Nole, intent on digging holes and nothing else, from morning sky to night.

"Broad spectrum antibiotics," he explained, seemingly deflated by my reaction. "Treats bacterial infections."

I considered the object. "Infection?"

He bobbed his head. "In-fec-tion…wound sickness."

How could this tiny object treat what I needed many things for? When sky eyes' wound was sick, and Sheppard's head wounds, I had needed river moss, poultices and cloth. "His sickness is inside," I said wisely. "That will not help."

McKay grinned and pulled part of the object off. "It goes inside."

I reached for it, only for sky eyes to yank it away. "Don't touch – it's sterile."

I had seen enough, though. The tip was so thin as to barely exist, but it was pointed at the top, almost like the arrow tips, but many many times smaller and thinner. "Will it treat your wound sickness, too?" I had not failed to notice the rising color in his cheeks, the flush that only came from the sickness returning. Walking from morning to night sky had brought back what I had feared.

"What? Of course it will."

"Do you have another?"

"There's just the one, it's an emergency kit. It's only meant to carry the bare essentials, and I'm always telling Carson he needs to stock more --"

With gentleness, I pushed him until he was sitting on the floor, Sheppard lying above him. He was confused, but let me roll his pants enough to expose the cloth I had wrapped around his leg. It was soaked through, life's blood and sickness staining the white bandage an ugly red-yellow. "It is why the pain is so much greater now than this morning," I told him. "I brought what little river moss I had left, but it might not be enough. The wound is aggravated. When that happens, I have found that healing is slower and longer. If the river moss does not work, the sickness can worsen and kill you even before the wound turns green."

McKay's hand trembled slightly. He looked nervously from his leg to Sheppard, lying still and pale. "But there's nothing you can do for him. Nothing – without this, he might die before they rescue us."

I fought against my feelings. I did not know their medicine, but clogged chest was a killer for my people. Most did not survive. But this sickness in sky eyes' leg, he could live, with treatment. "He is your litter mate, McKay. It is your decision to make."

"Litter mate?" The medicine dropped by his side as he gaped at me. "What's that mean?"

"Born of the same mother, or those in life that find a similar soul in one another," I explained. How could he not understand something so simple?

I did not envy him this decision. In my hands, it would not be easily made. I could not bear to let Sheppard worsen, to deny him the only hope he had, yet, I could also not bear to risk the sickness sneaking into McKay's heart and mind. "We should not have come. Neither of you were healed enough when the wraith fought us, and the day spent walking…" It had been too much, as I had feared it would be. "But if your people come soon?" I could not forget hope, even though I had little enough reason to hold onto it.

His face fell, the object still gripped in his hand. "For all we know, they might have already looked and found nothing. This was stupid, we're going to die here. I can't believe I agreed to come on this mission in the first place." He turned to Sheppard. "What were you thinking? Nothing ever goes right out here. We should've had back-up. The Daedalus, another Jumper, Ronon and Teyla! "

I touched sky eyes' chin, just for a moment, to get his attention. The ship was growing warm. Though I had a hard time believing in miracles, the hopelessness on sky eyes' face made me speak even while I knew I should be quiet. "When I was little girl, I was certain I would not be bound to Leom. He was the son of my mother's _mosul._ That made us important to one another, but he did not seem to even see my nose on my face."

"What does that have to do --"

"Listen, sky eyes," I scolded. His lips thinned but he stayed quiet, still clutching the medicine in his hand. "I went to my mother, crying, certain my life was over, because to be overlooked by a mosul's son was a grave insult. It meant I was not worthy, even to those that had more reason to love me, than anyone else. She dried my cheeks and told me that life is best lived in the moment of now. Do you understand?"

"Carpe diem?" he said with a grimace.

"More strange words from your tongue."

He sighed, but withdrew a small white item from the bag, ripping it open to reveal something that looked like white cloth but smelled unpleasant. "Seize the day," McKay said, pulling Sheppard's clothes to the side, revealing both Sheppard's arm and his decision. "A saying invented by the optimists of the world. I never believed in it because seizing the day often meant forgetting about tomorrow, and how screwed you are when it arrives."

I watched as he wiped the pungent smelling cloth over Sheppard's skin. I did not move to stop him. It was his choice, and whatever the outcome might be, it was not for me to interfere. He pushed the thin metal tip down and it disappeared into Sheppard's arm. I slumped further, feeling more tired than I remembered ever being since Lilani's death. When I spoke, it was for myself, as well as sky eyes. "For Sheppard, you must be this optimist. For yourself, because I do not think we will survive if we do not have hope."

Sheppard stirred as sky eyes withdrew the thin rod. His eyes cracked open enough that I could see the sliver of color hiding within. He blinked at the ceiling. McKay pushed the other part back over the metal tip and tossed it in the bag. Then, he leaned over Sheppard and placed a hand on his litter mate's belly. "Stay down or you'll probably fall on your butt, again."

"I fell?"

Before I could reassure Sheppard, McKay's smile grew and he said with more pleasure than I could understand, "You _fainted_."

Sheppard groaned. "Let it go, McKay."

"Never."

The spreading warmth in the ship, and maybe even the wounds I carried on my chest, made me sleepy. It had been a long, uncertain day. The weapon was not far from my reach, the doors a solid barrier between us and the storm, even the wraith, if it was out there. The howling wind whistled in through the cracks in the doors that led to the broken place Sheppard had called a cockpit. My mind grew fuzzy and slow, my thoughts returning to linger on magic medicine in small tubes, the strange words carpe diem, and panels like ice, before my mind fell lastly to a silver spaceflyer, gracefully darting amongst the twinkling stars.

I slept in my hope.

AN: one more chapter, I promise!


	4. Chapter 4

AN: This would be a shamefaced author admitting that, no, she did not manage to wrap the story up in this chapter. If I had pressed on, it would have been twice the size as the others and too long for one chapter and that's saying a lot since I'm okay with long chapters! So, this _almost_ wraps it up, and well, just read…hopefully you won't hate me! Thanks to sholio and Linzi for being my lightning fast betas, all that's left is mine.

**Chapter Four**

It was easy to feel much as a leaf would, caught in the strong river current. I was with Sheppard and sky eyes in their home, and I found myself surrounded by new things I did not understand and could only begin to fathom.

Sheppard worked on his weapons, slumping in the corner of the long bed, his back towards the damaged door that led to the broken room with the large ice shield. The place he had called a cockpit. The unfamiliar word was like spice on my tongue, bold and different. I was not sure I liked the taste, but maybe that was because it was damaged and bore the stains of their injuries.

Staring at Sheppard, looking at his tired face, I worried. I had spoken true to McKay when I said I could not help Sheppard.

Earlier, when I had been lulled into sleep, I had only drifted for moments – enough time to dream images and think thoughts I would have avoided if I had been fully awake. I had thought about both things amazing and scary. I had rested, but not so long that time turned around me.

Not so long that their people had arrived to save them.

What was there for my hands to do? The coal in my clay jar was forgotten, the food, set to the side, and they ate things in cloth that crinkled and felt like rocks, tumbled smooth by the rushing water. My arrows were like brittle sticks to their guns.

I watched as Sheppard pulled strange pieces of metal from the weapon. It was the one that had refused to fire, that had been discarded in the woods and the snow for all those days they had rested, healing, in my home. He eyed each piece before setting it down on the bed beside him, poking inside, like he was a healer with a patient. He was warm, content, and though I did not believe the medicine had cured his clogged chest, it did seem to have given the sickness a pause. He did not look well, but he did not look so ill I feared for his breath to stop.

Sky eyes, though, had the flush of fever high in his cheeks, and I did not miss how he held his foot off the floor. He worked in his panel, with another strange machine beside him. I knew they were trying to fix this spaceflyer, but I also knew the broken ice shield meant it could not go to the stars. I had heard Sheppard and sky eyes arguing over how they could go to this thing they called a Stargate, far above my world, in vacuum, McKay had said. They spoke so many words then that I did not know enough to offer advice, even if I had it to give. Words like warped doors, no seals and no suits.

Their words had changed then, to transmitters, emergency signals, and hoping their people would be up above, trying to find them.

"What brought your spaceship out of the sky?" I asked.

Sheppard's hands worked at wiping the weapon parts with a small, white cloth, thicker than any I had, other than the gnarl fur. "That's a good question." His look slid to sky eyes. "And I'm sure McKay can tell you."

"McKay is busy," said sky eyes, an edge to his words that I had not heard before.

I looked away from them, back to the door that could not shut fully. The wind still whistled angrily, stubbornly pushing through the small cracks. They were busy and I was useless. I had left my life behind and had nothing to do. My hands moved on my lap, restless. I was sitting near Sheppard, and I reached for one of the small pieces he had laid on the surface of this long bed we shared while he worked and I watched. "Find the words to tell me, Sheppard – what could bring this ship down, to crash here and change my life?" I wanted to understand. If my hands could not work, then my mind would.

When you lose everything, and find a new steadiness, only to be tossed again, is it so wrong to want to know why? Had father sky sensed my loneliness, even when I could not feel it, because I had buried it in my bones and hid it in my dreams? Had he brought these two males down for me?

I did not want to feel guilt for their hardship.

They had lost their people, their way of life; at least they had regained their broken ship and these weapons that could keep us safe from the wraith. "How did the white haired monsters come to the ground with you?"

Sheppard guarded his expression. "Mawani…how do I say this…" His smile was crooked and pained, but this time it was not caused by his chest. "You've lived…well, simply…here." His eyes almost seemed to talk, to say he was sorry for what he was trying to say. "And I don't mean to sound…condescending, but there's things that --"

"Oh, for the love of God, Sheppard." McKay's blustered interruption caused a look of relief and annoyance to flicker across Sheppard's face. "What he's trying to say, and completely messing up, is that you've lived with sticks and stones, and in no way is that your fault, but this technology, how it works, how the darts--" He saw my face empty -- the word meant nothing to me. "Wraith ships… Anyway, it's incomprehensible for you."

My lips thinned and Sheppard rushed to add, "That's not saying you can't learn."

"Sky eyes is fixing a transmitter," I said, bravely trusting in my memory. "You came through a Stargate in space, and fell through my sky, to the ground. This ship is connected to you, and your city. Your people might come, but they might not find us." It made a knot in my belly to think I could be the cause of their fall. "I did not know I was lonely, I promise. If father sky brought you here, I did not ask it." I thought I understood a great deal.

McKay's fingers stopped tapping on his machine and he looked up, an expression both irritated and exasperated. "You think you caused our crash?"

He asked it like I had said the moon had suddenly left the sky, ran away to play with the far away stars. I hated to let the truth feel the air. "I missed my kind." Still, I raised my face and looked him in his eyes. "If father sky wanted to make me happy…"

Would I have to lead them to the water and raise it to their lips to drink?

"It doesn't work that way." Sky eyes shook his head. I could tell he thought I was the silly one now.

His eyes found Sheppard's and he sighed. "_Fine_, not as if I'm not busy enough." His grumpy words did not go to his eyes, and I waited, eager to see what he could show me. He tapped more buttons and turned the odd shaped object until I could see a picture. It was as if it had been drawn and lifted off bark paper, life breathed into it. "I think those magical cliffs of yours are a lot more than myth. Going back through the data before we crashed, I found a high concentration of this ion --" he pointed to an image in the corner. To me, it looked like rocks and branches, stuck together to form shapes I had created as a child…triangles and circles. "Now, the levels have dropped precipitously, why, I can't say for certain, not without better equipment, but if I were to guess, I would say it had something to do with the changing seasons and the storms on this planet."

I tried to understand, to prove to them that they were wrong, that it was not too much magic for my thoughts to hold. "The cliffs _did_ bring you from the sky?" Then, was it not father sky's doing, after all?

"Yes, well," McKay shifted uncomfortably and turned his machine back towards him, "again, legend is often laced in fact."

"But what of the white haired wraith? How did they come to fall with you?"

Sheppard shifted, moving his folded leg until it touched the floor. A glimpse of pain skated by, then he took the part I had forgotten from my hand and explained, "It was orbiting your world, doing some kind of scans, near as we could tell." He looked sheepish. "We didn't register it until we were already descending into your atmosphere. It followed, and that's when both of our ships went haywire." He began to put all the parts back into the metal frame and shrugged. "After that, I'm coming up empty until I woke up against McKay's chest."

"Didn't I say never to --"

I smiled, remembering that time when sky eyes had acted silly about holding his litter mate so closely, and I had had nothing more on my mind than wonder at being near my own kind again. "Not to Sheppard," I reminded McKay.

Looking slightly disgruntled, McKay narrowed his eyes at the images on his machine. He talked to it, as if he were not interested in us, but I was not fooled. "Fine, well, now you both know, so we can forget that _ever_ happened."

"Hey, I'm just saying, didn't know you had it in you, McKay."

Sky eyes tapped another key, grinned and looked at both of us with the expectations of a new day. "Houston, we have transmission – if they're up there, they'll now be getting an -- "

"ET phone home?" Sheppard poked.

McKay's eyes rolled. "Must you be so annoying all the time?"

"Only when you're around," Sheppard returned easily.

"Do all your people bicker like two fens in a nest?" I asked.

Not that the answer mattered; all I wished for was the interruption. There was so much for me to think about, and their talking made my head ache at times, it would come so rapid. Whatever they believed, it still seemed to me that father sky had brought these males to me, the wraith falling along with them.

But, whatever happened, it did not change what was before me. "McKay, it is time to change your bandage."

I did not wait for him to stall. My supplies were in my satchel and I pulled them free, thankful I had thought ahead to bring what remained. He paled at the birch basket. "You know, actually, I bet Carson will be here by morning and you can just skip this primitive torture…"

"Let her treat your leg, Rodney. I don't want to see it sloughing off."

"That's just gross."

"Then shut up and be a good boy."

It seemed to me that sky eyes' glare carried thoughts towards his litter mate that I would not want to hear the words for, but he reluctantly pulled his pants up, past the calf to his knee, revealing the bandage, stained worse than even before. My worry soared higher than the treetops. He saw my fear, demanded, "What? Oh, no, it's not gangrenous is it?"

I tried to be gentle, but touching his leg made him shout. The bandage came off easily, dampened by the sickness of the wound. I felt ill looking at it. It was not green, but sickness bulged underneath the stitches. "I have to open it," I said, regret like ashes on my tongue, because this would hurt sky eyes, a lot. "The sickness builds inside and cannot escape."

Sheppard had left his place and now stared down at the wound. His eyes widened and he turned to the supplies sky eyes had dragged out when Sheppard had fallen asleep on his feet. When McKay had said he had _fainted_, and had given Sheppard the medicine I had known sky eyes needed for his leg, just as much as Sheppard had needed it for his clogged chest.

"Where's the damn antibiotic," Sheppard snarled, pulling free items of many shapes and sizes.

Their ship was not big. I could see the small tube on the floor, just behind the bag, where it had fallen after McKay tossed it away. It did not take much effort for me to lean over, stretch, and reach for it, feeling my fingers curl around the strange object. "Anti-bio-tic," I said, giving it to him.

He took it, stared at it blankly. I could tell, moment by moment, as he connected the thoughts to one another. That it was empty. That there were only two people in the ship that would need it, because I did not doubt that Sheppard knew he was dangerously sick inside. If McKay had used it on himself, he would have said so.

Sheppard's face froze, as if the storm had clutched him to its icy breast. "McKay," he said, calmly. "Where's the medicine that was in this syringe?" They both knew that he knew.

Sky eyes shook his head at me, so slight I almost missed it. What was he trying to say? He looked worried, angry, embarrassed – so many emotions for one man. Did he wish to keep it to himself, that he had given the medicine away for his litter mate? It was too late for it, no matter what he wished.

I looked back to Sheppard and said, "Both of you needed the medicine. I told sky eyes that I did not have medicine to treat your sickness, but I still had moss for his leg. It is my fault, Sheppard. He acted on my words."

McKay's forehead scrunched. "I don't need you to protect me," he grouched. "Just because someone is too stupid to use logic, doesn't mean my choice was wrong." He stared pointedly at Sheppard. "Because it wasn't."

I heard what sky eyes said, but I do not think Sheppard was listening. His hand was clenched around the empty tube of medicine, anger stomping across his face. "Yes, it was wrong." He slumped back, tossed the tube to the floor and lowered his head to his hands. When he lifted it again, frustration was ruling his heart. "Damn it, McKay! What were you thinking? You're the one capable of getting this ship in the air again. I'm not cutting your leg off because you were too stupid --"

McKay's face grew hot. "I gave it to _you_, Colonel, because Mawani thinks you've got pneumonia." It was his turn to give in to the heat of anger, and it subdued the other emotions that tried to rise to the surface of his soul. "You're the Rambo, not me, or did you forget there's still one very pissed off wraith out there!" He pointed furiously at the door leading outside.

Sheppard looked at me, the force of his fear and anger expanding to include me. I was now being lumped with McKay for going against his wishes. He did not want McKay's sacrifice, but it was not his decision to make. Even looking at sky eyes' wound, I could not fault him for his choice.

If it were not for the knowledge I had gained about these two males, I might have been hurt, but instead, I hurt _for_ them, not because of them. Sheppard would get over this, in time. I let my hair hide my face as I began to clean McKay's wounds, let the silence speak for me. They were both suffering – physically, and in a place within their mind that held their spirit.

Death had walked with me for cycles. I felt only sadness that it had touched these two who had seemed so full of life. I wished to tell death to leave, that if it must take anyone, to take me, but I knew more than any of my kind, death did not listen to the wants of a body of bone.

I worked with gritted teeth, cutting sinew and wishing sky eyes would fall asleep. His gasps were strong and heavy, and came often, with each stitch I had to remove. I do not know when Sheppard gave up his resentment and slipped to McKay's side, but when I finished, he was there, supporting sky eyes in the same manner I had had McKay do for him in those earlier days.

A thin tube, like the one McKay had used on him, lay on the long bed next to his thigh, the cap off and the contents gone. I raised a questioning look towards Sheppard.

"Morphine," he whispered heavily. "It takes away his pain."

I had not known it was possible for whispers to be heavy until now.

"How long?" His voice was hoarse -- from his clogged chest, and his worry.

"For you? Or for him?" I asked sharply. He needed to remember that it was not only sky eyes whose life was on a thin layer of ice.

"Him – if…the leg." He scrubbed tired hands over his face, as if trying to rub away the horrible decision. "If I cut it off, will he live?"

"Maybe, but I do not think it is that time yet…" As I worked, the wound oozed sickness copiously. I tried to soak it with the old bandage, but it was too great.

Sheppard eased out from behind sky eyes, gently settling his body against the bed's frame, heading to get something from the bag. When he returned, he handed me a package of oddly woven white cloth. I looked at him, wanting to know what it was.

"Gauze, it'll absorb the pus."

I nodded, thankful to have something that would help.

I hated this. All of this – the stink of the festering wound, and the fear radiating from Sheppard, along with the fevered sweat from both men. Father sky had sent two of my kind, and I could not even keep them alive for one full cycle of the moon. How useless was I? I finished binding sky eyes' wound with the last of the moss and bandages, then stared at Sheppard until he returned my gaze. "The medicine has helped your chest, but it will not last. Your people must come, Sheppard. If they do not, I fear neither one of you will live to see the sky empty of the moon."

I know the way of my time was confusing for him, so I held up my fingers, all ten, then held up another one. It was twenty-four turns of night and day before that one night came, where the moon hid, and the stars got to shine and rule the sky. It had been thirteen turns since the last – eleven more turns till it came again. Could they even live that long – could their bodies fight the sickness when they were already weakened from their injuries? Truthfully, I did not think they even had five.

"Yeah, well…" He stepped towards the cockpit, crumpling the outer covering of the gauze in his hands. I felt the rage rising in him, a tangible thing in the air, and only flinched away a little when he suddenly threw the wadded ball at the door. It was much too light to do anything other than bounce off, falling to the floor with hardly a whisper of sound. "That's just it, we're counting on a maybe, to keep away a sure thing, and that kind of situation always sucks."

At least Sky eyes was resting now, his wound as cared for as I could do with what I had left to me. I stood, surprised by the ache in my knees. My movements were stiff and painful. I had held still for too long, the floor had left marks against my bare skin. "Sit," I asked of Sheppard.

His eyes of many color stormed along with the wind, but he sat. I approached, my sadness weighting me down like the fish trap I lowered in the water – I had always placed a fat rock to keep it on the silt floor of the pool. "I want to listen." I gestured at his shirt.

For a moment, refusal threatened to spill from his lips, but I begged him with my eyes. It was the only thing I could do, did he understand that? And when he pulled his shirt up, I believed he did. I pressed my ear against the area near the broken bone. The crackles were there, the bone still soft, his skin radiated heat against my face. When I pulled away, he waited for me to speak, but all I could do was shake my head.

Was it the storm blocking the sun from my heart? Or was it the smell of death?

"You have faith in your people." I sat on the long bed. There was nothing more to be done. "You trust they will rescue you and sky eyes."

His fury had left and softness stepped in. He wore the gentle weariness of knowing there were things you could not control. "Yeah," he said. "I trust them."

I pulled my knees up under my tunic and held them, not because I was cold, but for the need to feel something solid in my hands, other than worry. "Then you do not let go, not ever." It was that simple.

OoO

The medicine did not keep sky eyes quiet for long. He woke, groggy and flustered. I had thought Sheppard had worked past his anger over McKay's actions, but I was wrong. After asking McKay how he was doing, and getting a caustic reply about how would anyone feel with a flesh-eating, bacteria-infested leg, Sheppard stepped in where they had left off, "And why's that? If you'd taken the shot for yourself…damn it, McKay, you didn't even ask me– I'm calling the shots on this mission, not you. You didn't have the right --"

"To save both our lives?" snapped sky eyes, his eyes haunted and peevish.

This ship, it was beautiful magic, but it was also small, and confining. There were no places for me to go, nowhere for me to slip away and pretend their words were between them, only, and not falling into my ears.

I sat on the bed and watched as Sheppard stood next to McKay, one arm leaning against the wall, for more support than I think he wished to admit.

McKay's machine was back on his lap, his fingers already in motion, tapping even while reaching for one of their strange objects of food.

"How does giving it to me save _your_ life?"

Even Sheppard's hair seemed to droop. McKay's eyes of blue looked watery and red. "I should've known better than to believe for one minute you'd think outside your closed, little military box. I don't need my leg to fix this ship, but unless I've greatly underestimated your capabilities, _Colonel_, you need to be able to breathe to fight off a wraith!"

"I've got three guns, Rodney. Not to mention some C4. I could be hooked to an oxygen tank and still kill the damn thing."

"Like you managed to kill the one that almost killed you – the one I had to save you from? Or did you forget the scar on your shoulder and the broken ribs you nursed for weeks after that? Did you forget Abrams and Gaul's memorial service?"

The air, it was tainted. This was all wrong.

For this amazing spaceflyer to be filled with such awful emotions. They were letting their fear overwhelm everything else. I had found my own worries were like a leech, drawing away the hope and amazement I had first felt.

"Teach me your words," I asked impetuously. They needed something else to focus their thoughts on. Anything, other than McKay's sacrifice, and how angry it had made Sheppard.

This seemed as good of an idea as any other. If I was to leave my world, and go with them, I would need to know the meaning of so many things – as much as I could learn. Of their bags, and weapons, ships and medical supplies. I knew I used words they found awkward, cumbersome, and different. My speech patterns were odd to them. A part of me wished to cling to my words, but the other part, it did not want to be embarrassed when I met Teyla, Carson, Ronon and Elizabeth, and all the others that lived in this city that they had told me about. I did not want to say something to bring redness to Sheppard and McKay's cheeks.

I thought for a moment they would pretend my words did not exist. Then, McKay snorted. He finished chewing the strange food in shiny coverings, and lifted a teaching finger. "The most important word in our language is --"

"Please," interrupted Sheppard smoothly. He moved to the bed, sat with a grimace, then raised an eyebrow towards sky eyes, his chin jutted, as if daring McKay to disagree. "Isn't it, Rodney. Manners are very important to our people."

"—chocolate." Sky eyes glared at Sheppard. "Priorities," he waggled.

Sheppard frowned, pulling himself straighter, as if rising to the challenge that only they knew. "Ferris wheels."

I did not think they were so easily letting go of the resentments as I had hoped.

McKay's head bobbed. "Nin-ten-do."

For a moment, Sheppard was quiet, planning his next words. This verbal battle was built of odd pieces of life, and I was as lost as a seed in the wind. But it was better than the heavy emotion from earlier. If only I had root to split, or wood to whittle.

A slow, lazy grin spread across Sheppard's face as he enunciated, "T.V."

"Japan."

McKay's food wilted in his grip, forgotten.

"Detroit."

"California."

"Notre Dame."

"Oh, please. Everyone knows Michigan is leading."

I interrupted their play, happy that my intent had borne fruit. The hurtful words were silenced. But now I truly did wish to learn. "These words have meaning, but you keep it to yourself, and I am not sure they are words I must know." They felt as random as a leaf, shaken from the branch. It had been an excuse, to get them to forget their pain, but now I wanted to know more. I needed to know so many things.

The bag sky eyes had first brought over to the long bed, the same one that Sheppard had rifled through, was nearby, lying discarded. Now, I pulled it near and lifted another object out, holding it in the air. This thing was much larger than any other item, heavy and with many switches on it.

I was a healer – _these_ were words I wanted to know. "What is this?"

OoO

McKay and Sheppard had taken turns, each explaining items. Sheppard taught me about the gun he called a 9 mil, and the other, the P90, and then the C4. He showed it to me and explained how it exploded, but I did not understand, until he went to the day when the white haired wraith took my people and my village had burned from the falling stars.

"Those weren't stars, Mawani, those were explosions, coming from their weapons."

I had been relieved when sky eyes told Sheppard he was corrupting me, and turned their words to things that did not bring back the awful memories. He pointed to the panels and explained plastic, crystal, and metal com-po-nents. The long beds were benches. The floor was grating, and the odd machine with pictures brought to life was a com-pu-ter. I tried to tell McKay that they had magic of the kind my father would have been afraid of, but he insisted it was science – something that had elevated his people from drawing in the mud with sticks, to flying in ships and traveling through 'gates in space.

Was it unfair if I told him I understood, while inside, I thought there were too many things to remember? I could barely repeat the words correctly. I knew I was often mixing them up with one another in my mind, what they were, and what they meant.

It was a distraction, nothing more. And maybe I would remember some when the next day arrived. We played at it for three or four of their hours, while Sheppard pretended he was fine, and McKay snuck worried glances at his leg.

If their people heard the transmitter, and tried to come for them, would the storm keep them away? Sheppard said maybe, McKay said they'd better not, because it wasn't like they had forever. That made them grow quiet, the frustration finding its way to the surface again.

Whereas before, hope had snatched me into its sleepy arms, now fear hounded me till I sought refuge in the dreams. When the waking moments were this difficult, the dreams now held no worse for my mind. I had my memories back – the nightmares could not make me sadder than I already was.

The whistling wind and the slight shifting of the ship in the storm, the courage it took to stay here, even while I feared sky eyes and Sheppard would never leave, drove me to that escape.

I did not dream.

I woke to the wind still screeching and sky eyes' mutterings. He talked to his fingers, words I did not understand. A blanket we had brought from my home was loosely draped over my body. I felt sleepy and warm, like the bee-tended honey, melting under the sun's strength at midday. To feel this warm during the cycle of cold – it was more magic.

The comfort lulled me into abeyance, and it was not until I considered it odd that Sheppard had not responded to any of McKay's frustrated words, that I realized it was because Sheppard was not in the room with us. Suddenly, the warmth flew from my bones like the bird from the cliffs. "Where is Sheppard?" I demanded, feeling a chill in my belly. How many places could Sheppard be? The strange and damaged cockpit, or outside, in the biting and furious snow.

The storms were not to be played with, they were not the log in a lazy, drifting stream. They were the driftwood, thrown into the churning current that ran swiftly down the middle of the widest places in the river. I had become lost in a storm such as this many cycles ago and had believed I would never see the sun again – it was only a small miracle that I had found a large evergreen, its coat of needles stretching to the ground, and found shelter within its protecting branches.

"He went to make sure Lurch isn't descending on us – the machine we have that tells us if someone is near is broken, just like everything else." McKay's attention did not even waver away from his panels. "Damn!"

I was on my feet and moving to the hatch. Where was my cloak? "He should not have gone! How foolish are you – he is sick, sky eyes, the same as you, and even well, the storms are no match for our kind. They will kill him just as easily as the white haired wraith." Where were my fur coverings? Frustrated, I scanned for my clothes, not even remembering taking them off. I must have –

Sky eyes dropped one hand and twisted his shoulder to glare at me. "Do I look stupid to you?" He turned back to his work. "I told him it was suicide. Does he listen to me?"

"You are his litter mate," I stated clearly, still searching for my cloak. Hidden in a corner, past the long bed, I saw a pile of items. Their sacks, the supplies sky eyes had dug through for the anti-bio-tic, and a tuft of white hair sticking valiantly up. "You have his ear, whether you believe it or not." I reached for my cloak and pulled it free, scowling as other items spilled to the floor. Too many things made me long for the simplicity of my shelves and baskets. "If he did not listen, you did not try hard enough." I left the items scattered and fastened my cloak around my shoulders, thankful I had fallen asleep with my boots on. My head and hand coverings were wadded together. With them in my hand, I was ready to search for a very foolish, dark haired Sheppard.

"That's completely --" he frowned at the wire in his fingers then looked at me, his face worried and conflicted. "I'm the one that needs careful handling, not Sheppard – I've never had to do it before, no one can blame me for being inept at this. I missed the day they held registrations for Colonel Handling 101, so give me a break. I'm doing the best I can, under the worst of conditions, and I assure you, having heat right now is one amazing feat for the day."

"How long has he been gone?"

I was in front of the door and looked for a latch. There was no string to pull, or log to lift – how did one open this metal obstacle?

McKay limped over. It was only a few short steps, but he panted from the effort, slapping his hand against the wall. "Only minutes, I'm sure he's fine. He has more lives than a cat."

The metal wall groaned and moved. It was odd enough to watch it do so without an arm or leg to help it, but as it lowered, small flakes fluttered in on the puffs of harsh, chill air, making me worry even more. Before it rested fully on the ground, I was stepping forward.

McKay grabbed my arm. "Be careful. Of the two of you, I'd place bets on Sheppard making it back in one piece."

"Then you would bet poorly." Night sky had claimed the world and all I could see was darkness and shadows. "Do you have a magic light?"

"Magic light…" He stared at me until his confusion cleared and he snapped his fingers. "A flashlight, yes." He hurried to the mess I had made on the floor, bent and scooped one of the metal tubes, bringing it to me. I held my hand and felt the cold weight, waiting for it to begin lighting my way.

After a moment, McKay shivered and demanded, "What are you waiting for? Go, hunt, do that Pocahontas thing."

"I need another. This is not working." What good was a metal tube with bits of sun if it were not as dependable as the turns of night and day? The wind whipped my cloak off my shoulders and folded it against my arm. When I found Sheppard he would know the depths of his misstep.

Sky eyes reached with one finger and pushed against a small raised bump on the surface. Light flooded outward, startling me. He smiled as if he had created the trees himself. "On," he said. His finger slid the bump back and the light winked out, as if covered with a blanket of night. "Off."

I wished I had forever to stare at these strange objects of theirs; to spend a day and night touching, holding and seeing the wonder that they did, but Sheppard was walking in danger he did not know, and I had to find him before the cold took his breath away.

The flash-light was hard in my hand, and I used my finger to turn the sun back to life, smiling grimly as I repeated sky eyes', "On." The cold already cut through my clothes and burrowed into my skin. "I will return with Sheppard." He stood uncertainly, the bulk of his weight on his good leg, his skin the color of a skinned animal. "Do not leave, McKay. The woods in a storm is death waiting. Do not be foolish."

"What if neither of you comes back?"

"Then you wait for your people and find our bodies to bury in the sun."

Without giving him time to reply, I left, disappearing into the swirling mass of snow, my only beacon, the light from their metal tube. It lit up steps ahead of me and no more. I listened, picking out the distinct sounds of storm and door, until the door was shut, and all the remained was the angry wind, snarling at me for daring to walk forth in its domain.

I should not be here. The thought chattered through my teeth, as my body fought to adjust to the temperature.

I should be in my home, sitting by the hearth, feeling the heat from river rock, and sewing root thread or shaping baskets. I did not belong here, hunting to save another in the night sky, ravaged by cold that would steal my soul and leave a frozen body behind.

Yet, here I was, stepping forward once, twice and three times, scanning the places around me with a light that could not hold off the weight of night, even with its magic. The ground was drifted and barren. If Sheppard had gone this way, there was no trail for me to follow. I took my eyes away from the hopeless search of the ground and stared instead at the trees, looking at the scraggly branches, hoping to find any that might be broken, or knocked free of their new winter coat.

Soon, it was as if my ears were muffled, so surrounded by the overwhelming noise of the wind had I become. The light was heavier in my hands as my feet floundered, tripping into the deeper drifts. I had not seen any sign of Sheppard and my fear had risen in my throat, choking me. Sky eyes had said he had not been gone for very long. Surely, I had gone farther, knowing the woods as I did? And yet, I had seen no branch disturbed of its winter burden, or seen the white blanket marked before my feet. It was smooth and polished, and even with the winds, a footprint would last for more than these minutes of theirs.

More than a minute, less than an hour.

I had been careful and made marks on the trees to lead me back to the spaceflyer, but if I waited much longer, the marks would also be covered. The snow would cling to the tree trunks, climbing up from the roots like a white moss, hiding scratches and bark. My need to find Sheppard, to call for him, competed with the screams of wind, and the fear of the white haired wraith, that even now might be stumbling close by.

I continued to walk and look. Every few steps, I stopped and pointed the light in a circular motion, looking for any signs of my male. How could he be so childish? Had his mother never taught him to be careful? What father could train up a boy into a man, and fail to teach him about storms, cold, and foolish decisions?

Shivering in my cloak, my legs wet and numb, I stumbled forward, knowing soon I would have to turn back or face the same fate I was sure was Sheppard's. Closing my eyes, imagining his lithe body slumped against the ground, the breath freezing in his air cavities, I felt sick. "Please, father sky, let me find him." I whispered it low, so that the wraith could not hear, and only the spirits knew.

When I felt it, I could not say. I kept walking, moving out from the ship in a pattern like that of a dropped pebble in a pond. I felt like a Nole, spied upon by the Fen, waiting for that one moment when the Nole ventured too far from its burrow. Not able to move fast enough to scurry to safety and avoid the strong beak that could snap branches in half, let alone small bodies of bone and fur.

More than once, my feet slowed, and I pointed the sunlight in many directions, certain it would reveal a monster, ready to leap on me.

The night predators were sleeping now, but could one be up and about, disturbed from its winter sleep by the ship? By my feet, or Sheppard's?

I had forgotten to take knife, or bow and arrow. I had nothing but the metal tube and my hands to fight off any creature, night predator or white haired wraith. I stepped again, waiting to hear if it was echoed. Only a howl of wind rose up around me, many branches bending to the strength of the storm – some cracked and crashed to the forest floor, their impact muffled by the new snow.

Minutes had turned into an hour, I was certain of it, having held one watch before, and learning to feel the passage of time in their words. Sky eyes would be worried.

A sound that did not belong flitted into existence and disappeared, as quickly as it had lived. I spun, but there was nothing there. Should I call for Sheppard? If he was just out of reach, we could pass by one another and never be the wiser. The night was too dark, even with the fat, heavy clouds that could sometimes lighten the night sky. The woods, too loud in their fury.

But what if it was the wraith?

When I was little, my father had taught me a poem.

_Day embraces our heart;_

_Night holds our soul._

_Sun begs for many smiles;_

_Moon catches the tears that must fall._

I had asked, "_But what of the clouds, father? What of the white, grey and black that comes and hides the sun and the moon?"_

He had pressed me close and whispered in my hair, _"That, Mawani, is the time of maybe. It is when father sky cannot decide whether to shed tears or not, and it is the time in all life when we do not know whether to smile, or cry."_

"_I do not like the clouds. They cover sky. I want to see the sun and stars."_

Now, I stood in the clouds. Not knowing if I should speak, or hold my words. Maybe it was father sky that guided my hand, then, because without much thought, I thumbed the bump on the metal tube and the small sun disappeared. Blackness held me, and I used its cloak to step away from where I had been, knowing if I was watched, to stay in one place was foolish.

When it came, I was not ready. The smell preceded it; Night predator!

It hit me with a glancing blow, yet it was enough that I flew into a nearby tree, hitting so hard my teeth rattled and the branches dumped their snow down my cloak, falling into my tunic and down my back. Dots danced in an already dark world.

They were beasts that only lived to kill, vicious and single-minded. The only good words to speak of one were that they did not like the sun. They rarely ventured out during day, night was their land, and even with it being the time of cold, I had been careless to not come prepared. It had been long since I had seen one, the last being the night predator I had taken down with my bow, arrow and poison.

I rolled to my feet, crouched, holding the metal tube ready to strike back. It was not much, and it might only make the beast angrier, but I would not go down without a fight. I turned, seeking in the night for the shadow moving. Would the sun in the tube send it away, or would it give the animal the path to me? Fear held my finger and I stayed in the dark.

Had it claimed Sheppard?

Anger surged through my body. "I have survived the monsters," I shouted to the air, to the night predator. "I have survived an entire world of people, the loss of everyone I loved, and lived. I lived through the storms, through the death of Lilani and Leom. Do you think I will let such a stupid animal as you end my life when a white haired monster could not?"

The smell of wet fur and dead animals seeped towards me, a low growl seeming to come from behind and in front.

When it leapt, all I saw was the shadow. I raised my hand with the metal tube and covered my head, aiming my hit. The wailing of the wind was broken into a shattered edge of ice, sharp, rapid echoes driving into my ears. Flashes of flame burst from somewhere to my side, and the night predator screamed in pain, falling away before it reached my body.

Relief burned through me.

I moved the switch till light returned and aimed it towards the flashes, knowing Sheppard had saved my life.

A figure stepped forward, the size and shape wrong, pushing something up and off their eyes.

"Are you all right?"

It was a woman, like me, but taller. She wore clothes like Sheppard and McKay, carried a weapon like the one Sheppard had fired in the woods. I knew her. This was the one McKay had told me of.

"Teyla, from the city in the sea," I breathed. A rush of emotion ran through my heart. "Sheppard is lost in the storm, there is a wraith; McKay is in the ship trying to fix it! Did you bring your Carson? He needs a healer, with medicines stronger than I have…this anti-biotic? Did you bring more?"

Another stepped from the shadows, much taller, his mouth curling in visible amusement. "Looks like Sheppard did it again."

OoO

In the turns of day and night to come, I would often think back to that moment of meeting Sheppard's and sky eyes' people. How amazing they were, in their full bloom of health, with their many strange weapons and clothing of black night. The woman was Teyla, the man, Ronon – both different than Sheppard and McKay, yet, they were connected by a thread in this life they lived.

They were amazing. They were frightening.

They were deliverance walking.

Teyla bore the barrage of questions from me, standing tall in the storm, telling me that they had been to the ship, with their Carson. McKay was even now being helped with their medicine, but Sheppard had not returned.

"How long ago did you come?" I needed to know. Had I been gone too long? Was Sheppard surely dead?

"Rodney told us you had left only moments before we arrived," she explained. "Now, we must find John." She looked towards Ronon. "We need Carson and the life signs detector."

John.

Dark haired Sheppard had a second name-- John, like McKay's Rodney. The flavor was strong, just as the man. "It has been at least one of your hours since I left to search for him." The wind drove stinging, bitter flakes against my face. "He is ill. If we do not find him soon --"

The magic light only deepened the shadows on her beautiful face of sun roasted wood. "So Rodney said." She pulled the strange device over her eyes, hiding them from my sight. "We will find him," she promised, stepping away.

It was not spoken for me to follow, but I knew it. My feet were thick, fat and numb from the cold, but I stayed close to their heels. They led me in a path to their ship, with our heads bowed against the ferocious winds, our bodies hunched as far into our clothing as possible. The only mercy was traveling straight as a bird would fly. It had the ship within sight in much less time than I had spent seeking Sheppard, with my rippling circles. Teyla and Ronon slowed until their feet stopped, slipping their eye coverings off, again, and looking between the trees at the spaceflyer. The door was open, spilling light into the ravaging storm. Flakes flurried into the escaping light before disappearing to the ground, reclaimed by the dark.

Panicked words fought to stay in the air.

"What! No, don't eat him! I swear if you touch a hair on his head, I won't fix this ship and you'll never get off this planet!"

Sky eyes!

His words were full of fear.

My feet moved forward, knowing I had to help.

Teyla's hand caught my arm and held. "There is a wraith in there," she whispered, her face twisting, as if someone had given her something good and turned into bad while it rested in her grasp.

"Then we must save him!" Did they not see the danger? "I will not let the monster have him." I did not know Sheppard's fate, but sky eyes was in that ship, with a white haired monster – was it threatening their Carson? Had they come to save their people, only to lose their lives?

"Stay here," ordered Teyla. She motioned signals to Ronon, and without waiting to hear words that I would do as she said, they split away from me, each taking a side. I was left standing alone, bereft in the barren woods, my body shaking in the gusts. My heart hammered at me to move, to run forward to the ship and fight with bare hands to save sky eyes and his Carson, but my mind scolded me, and told my feet to stay.

Ronon and Teyla had weapons that would kill the wraith.

I waited, shivering and worried.

The darkness held them in secret until I saw their shadowed shapes form out of the angry storm by the sides of the ship. Teyla and Ronon nodded, then turned and ran inside, their weapons pointing forward.

"Get away from him!" Ronon's deep voice boomed, not even the shrieking gusts could disguise it.

"Ronon, don't! It'll just drain his life!"

That was Teyla's voice, harder to hear, but it sent shivers in my blood that had nothing to do with the wetness seeping in through my fur boots, or the wind gusting up my tunic and through my bare legs.

My mind lost to my heart, and my feet ran.

When I touched the metal of the door, stood in the light and saw with my eyes what the words had meant, I felt sick. It was not sky eyes in the hands of the wraith, and it was not their Carson. Their healer sat on the long bed, their bench, with sky eyes near him, McKay's machines and tools by his side. The white haired monster knelt in the middle, a crumpled body on the floor by his feet. Unruly hair the color of the night sky told me even what the patched clothes on the legs and arms did.

It was Sheppard.

The wraith had its hand pressed against Sheppard's chest, watching Ronon and Teyla with a gloating smile. They were only a handbreadth from me. The threat the monster had given stalled their feet.

"What have you done?"

My words fell like ice from the cliffs.

The wraith's voice resonated in the ship. "Nothing, yet…Come nearer, and I will take his life from him."

McKay's face was flushed – fever and fear. "You do that and you can forget _ever _escaping this world. You drain him and we kill you." His exclamation was rapid, rushed and full of the panic, up until he said the last with satisfaction, as if he had already done the killing. I suppose, in a way he had. He had killed the white haired wraith that had been moments from stealing my life.

"Just give me a reason," Ronon said. His deep voice rumbled like the storms in summer sky.

Sheppard stirred, his legs pulling upwards, as if he were trying to stand. The wraith, with no more care than I would use to swat an insect from my face, slapped him across his head. Sheppard's legs collapsed downward, reminding me of the floppy fish I knocked senseless with a rock.

"You'll give him a bloody contusion on his brain, if you do that again!"

Their healer's face was suffused with the same red as McKay's, but his stemmed solely from his anger over how one he cared for was being treated. He sat stiffly, his hands jerking slightly, as if he sought to go to Sheppard even while the wraith barred his way.

I was quickly beginning to see what Sheppard had felt about Teyla…what I had heard underneath his words, hidden in his speech. The respect for this woman. She did not step away, or give hint of the turmoil she must surely feel within, at seeing her friend on the floor, the wraith so close, that one wrong step from any of us might end Sheppard's life. Could her weapon kill the wraith, like it had the night predator?

"What do you want?"

Her demand was hard wood, polished by many rubs of cloth.

"What --" sky eyes almost came off the bench. "What are you doing? You can't…bargain with a wraith! "

"Rodney, he has the colonel." Teyla nodded at the wraith, encouraging it to speak.

The white haired monster's lips curled. It felt superior, believed it was better because it did not care. "I became trapped on this world when my ship crashed." The cold eyes glittered. "I will spare this one's life if you take me to another world, with a Lantean ring."

Their healer looked as if the wraith had just asked for something as simple as a branch, or a berry. Easy to grant, easy to take. "Fine, now let me care for him, or he won't live to be your bargaining tool for much longer."

"Doc, I'm not letting a wraith live."

Ronon's weapon was straight and steady, not wavering with his announcement. There was promised violence intertwined like ivy in every word.

"What are --," sky eyes tried to stand, and muffled a screech. His fear was such that he had forgotten his wound, and only had thoughts for his litter mate, lying still under the wraith's limited benevolence. He subsided onto the bench, letting Carson steady him. "Just stop with the Conan routine, all right? Seriously – Sheppard doesn't have time for heroics." He fixed the wraith in his angry glare. "You want off this hell hole of a planet, fine." Sky eyes snapped impatient fingers at Teyla and Ronon. "We're going, now. Where's the other ship?"

Another ship?

I felt stupid, as slow as the baby gnarl. Of course there was another ship – how else could they have descended from the sky?

Ronon twitched.

The white haired wraith pressed his hand down against Sheppard's chest in response, a reflexive groan sliding free of Sheppard's lips. My belly tightened. His broken bone…the monster did not know about his broken bone.

"We will take you." I could read the disgust on Teyla's lips. "But if you harm him, Ronon will kill you."

I did not doubt her.

Sky eyes grew floppy in his relief.

Their healer moved towards the crumpled figure on the floor, but the monster made an abrupt jerk of his head. "No," it stated, the raspy words sliding across my skin like oil from the gilly weed. "Not until you take me to another world." The laugh was wrong, poisoned. "I will bargain, human, but I do not trust you."

Teyla's eyes were bitter. "And I do not trust you," she stated coldly. "We should go." She nodded towards Ronon, Carson. The one helped sky eyes, but he was wobbly on his feet, a newborn baby gnarl could have stood straighter, and I reached forward, to help their healer. Ronon's weapon did not waver. When I turned, my body was near their bench and their supplies. Behind sky eyes was the small weapon Sheppard had given me before, half-hidden by the place where the top and bottom pillows met. Sky eyes had been sitting on it.

His eyes of blue met mine; they narrowed and moved, just a little.

At first, I did not know what he meant, but as he fell to the side, every eye turned to him, except mine; their bodies blocked the wraith from seeing me. The weapon! I reached for it quickly, praying that my fingers were as stealthy as the night predator that had stalked me earlier. I grabbed the weapon, feeling the weight and the strangeness against the calluses on my hands. While Teyla and Carson helped him to his feet, I stumbled against sky eyes, an additional attempt at distraction, tucking the weapon inside his waist, behind his thin patched coat.

"You lead," the wraith ordered. It kept its hand on Sheppard's chest, while lifting him to his feet with his other hand.

It was the first time I could look fully on Sheppard and I felt my heart stutter. His face was as white as the snow, dark circles pulling at the skin below his eyes. Fever stood out against his cheeks. I could hear the shallow, wheezing breaths. "What good is a dead bargain?" I demanded, even while sky eyes took an awkward hop forward.

The tattooed eye crinkled; the monster was amused. "I can feel his life. He will not die soon."

Words saying otherwise hovered on my tongue, but I turned away. McKay was heavy, and hot. We stumbled into the storm, Teyla leading, Ronon pacing the wraith while it dragged Sheppard. I had many questions, but two burned brighter than the others. "Is your ship near?" I asked Carson, almost shouting to be heard. "Did you give sky eyes your anti-bio-tic?"

Carson leaned forward, sky eyes' arm wrapped tightly around his neck. The short steps we had taken already caused him to draw labored breaths. "You must be Mawani," he gasped. A savage gust of wind pushed us forward. The edges of night lightened the sky many distances away, touching the treetops. "Rodney says he owes you his life."

McKay yelped, and huffed. "That is not what I said, Carson!" I could feel the sweat soaking through his shirt, sticking to my arm that I had braced around his middle. "I merely said her primitive skills kept us alive, despite the super bacterium that infests this planet." His raised foot bumped against a fallen log, hidden under the snow, setting off a new wave of, "Ow ow ow!"

It had amazed me before, and it amazed me now -- to see that it was not a trait limited to sky eyes and Sheppard -- that these people could speak of the unnecessary, even while all life crumpled around them. Yet, Carson's eyes were very serious as he added, "Hush, Rodney – love, the ship is just ahead, and I did treat him. It'll be touch and go, but I think he'll keep his leg."

"If the wraith doesn't dine on us first," McKay muttered.

This is not how I had imagined leaving my world. The weight of sky eyes pushed me towards the ground, the icy air dug into my air cavities with renewed strength. I saw the ship, then, and realized the lightening fingers of day were stretching to the forest floor. The winds gusted, passionless. The storm had arrived early and burnt itself out before its time.

The wraith struggled with Sheppard behind me.

When we approached the new ship -- a second spaceflyer -- the same awe snuck into my bones, and held my life's blood, frozen in that one moment of realization that there were things out there, bigger and better than my existence, and even if I were to die right now, to have seen it, and to have known it, how blessed I was.

I wished to linger, to touch one that was whole and unbattered, but the wraith snarled that Sheppard's life was not a certainty if we did not hurry. I glared over my shoulder, wishing for all the breaths I had, that I could end its cruelty and life with only a single thought. That I could make our trouble wink out of existence, like the fish did with the floating insect.

We took hard won steps and were inside. The same benches, floor and objects lined the walls. The doors in the front were not bent or twisted, and the shield of ice was smooth and untouched.

The wraith pulled Sheppard along like he was already a dead animal, until he was in front of Sheppard's cockpit. But this was not Sheppard's spaceflyer.

"Take me to the world with these glyphs."

Sky eyes stumbled forward, shaking off my support, wavering. He looked at the strange symbols that rested between those two chairs as the wraith pointed them out. "That's suicide – there's three hive ships in orbit."

Teyla frowned at the monster. "We will take you to a world that has been culled and emptied, nowhere else."

It tasted the air – to decide if they told lies? Then it nodded jerkily, spun, and dragged Sheppard to a bench, moving his body down, till they both sat, Sheppard propped against the monster. I shivered at how he must feel – did he know he was resting against death?

Maybe he was not aware. I would wish that for him, even if I worried at what it meant for his healing.

I swallowed back the tangy taste of my fear and sat beside Sheppard, his body all that separated me from the wraith. If he could feel death on one side, then he could feel life on the other. I knew the wraith would not let me take Sheppard's head against my chest, but I pressed my thigh close to his, let my arm and side touch so that he could feel something warm.

"Please, let me at least give him some medicine." Carson's face was pinched, his thoughts troubled.

"If he dies after we drop you off, I'll hunt you down, and kill you." Ronon held more danger in his body than any night predator could manage. I was glad to know this man cared for Sheppard and McKay. I believed every word he gave to the air.

I could tell the monster was affected, even if it did not wish for me to know. It tried to grin like we were nothing more than the Noles, useless and passing, but I thought maybe the grin was to hide emotions, like fear and desperation. I was glad. It should feel more fear than its bones could hold.

"You may give him your medicine, but if you try anything, all I must do is feed, and he will turn old before your eyes."

"Carson." Teyla waited at the doors leading to the chairs.

"Aye," he nodded, standing. He patted sky eyes on the knee, turned, and pulled a bag free from the hole in the roof. It looked similar to the one I had seen in Sheppard's ship, except there was a large white mark, and the cloth was red instead of black. With more speed than McKay had managed, he pulled out the supplies he needed.

Carson eyed the wraith warily -- waiting to see if it would try and stop him, even though it had given permission. The white haired monster jerked its head. "Do it now, if you wish to do it at all."

I shifted towards the wall, enough to give Carson a clear path to Sheppard's shoulder. He smiled briefly at me then leaned in, quickly pushing Sheppard's ragged shirt to the side, exposing bare skin. He was adept, wiping skin and emptying the tube's contents in a motion so smooth it almost seemed to be one movement, rather than the two that it was.

When he was finished, he gave Sheppard's shoulder a final squeeze, then slid the thin metal tip back into the cap. He tossed it in the still open bag. A worried look passed between him and McKay.

I wondered at the meaning as he headed to the chair in the front. But then I had other thoughts to fill my mind.

This was it.

Carson was going to fly this ship, take me from my world.

Life had been the same for me for many cycles. I would wake with the sun, and sleep with the moon. I would take my walks, and find hurt creatures, treat their wounds. I wove thread to keep clothes around my body, though the root had never been so fine as that which my mother had woven on a loom made from branches. Try as I had, I could not recreate that which only my memory said existed. The pictures in my mind had not been there.

Not until the memories had returned, but by then I had the males, turning my days into night and my night into days. They had changed everything. It was scary to realize, that it was not only that I did not have my hearth, or my shelves. I did not have my home. But I also was not the same soul as I had been even in those moments before sky eyes' cry had found me in the woods.

When their ship lifted from the ground, the motion was so gentle, it was like a mother rocking a baby, safely in her arms – enough movement only to cajole the tears of the infant away. If I leaned forward and looked through the ice shield, I could see the trees beginning to disappear.

It would have been a picture worth holding my breath inside, if it were not tempered by the monster sitting so near I could touch it. I looked away from the scene that should have held my eyes for many more moments than what it did, and looked at the wraith, the cause for all of this.

If it were not for the white haired monsters, I would be in my village, and I would stand with my family. I would have saved Sheppard and McKay, given them back to their people, and then we would have waved goodbye to them as their ship of silver reached for their stars and left us in peace. We would have sung, danced and thought how amazing that there was life beyond father sky, with others of our kind, and then we would have returned to work the tools of the ground, and the looms I could not remember. I would have gathered with my childhood friends as we tended our children, laughed about our husbands, and told stories of the silly things the babies did.

But the monster sitting like a tree, upright and strong, had taken that from me. I felt the images of what could have been fall from my mind like dust. The pictures that took its place –Sheppard leaning against the monster I would just as soon see dead as ever walk another step, and sky eyes, staring at me with a face of similar horror. McKay loathed and feared the wraith, resented the position we were in, but he had been clear he would do what he must to save Sheppard.

I looked at Sheppard's face, studied him to see if there was any hope left.

The medicine would help, but I feared for his breaths to stop. His chest rose in weak attempts at taking air, his eyes were pinched shut. His long arms hung loosely, with no control in any muscle. When I looked up and found Ronon watching, I shivered. There was hatred in his eyes for this wraith that rivaled mine.

"You're cold," McKay said, abruptly. "Here, take my jacket."

I began to tell him I would not take from him…sky eyes was sick, he needed the warmth. But my eyes found his, and along with reading the pain, still hard and strong in his bones, I saw the slight widening and the rise of his chin. That's when I remembered – the weapon!

"I am cold," I spoke, trying not to let the wraith see my face and read me like the sky.

While McKay began to slip free of his coat, his movements stiff, he began to talk – to try and distract the wraith. "So, Darth, what were you doing in orbit around PX9-MM4?" He pulled his arm free of one sleeve, slipped it from his back, folding it like the motion was a natural as shedding skin. "Were you in the neighborhood, or did you just get lost in the big, bad galaxy?" With a false quirk of his mouth, sky eyes tried to be brave, but I saw the small twitch that betrayed his nervousness as he handed me the folded coat.

The monster snarled.

Ronon's weapon whined.

For a moment, I thought everything I had fought for would end, right then. Ronon was going to shoot the wraith, and it would steal life from Sheppard, and even if Ronon could kill it before it leapt to me, I did not think it would matter.

But then the wraith's snarl turned to a laugh that grated against my skin like ice on a rock. While I tried to slip the coat on and keep the weapon hidden, it said, "Why not – nothing I say is going to change that your efforts are useless. We will find where you Lanteans are hiding, and feed on you, even while we take from your minds the path to Earth."

The weapon was heavy inside the coat, in a pocket. They had sewn _pockets_, inside their clothes! I found myself thanking father sky that these people were so resourceful.

"Really?" McKay's words were not worried. "That's why we've managed to kill…" he looked at Ronon. "How many hives now?" He acted as if the number had been no more important than a pebble in his shoe.

Ronon shrugged, "Two last year, two this year, or was it one?" His dark eyes glittered with malevolence that made me look twice at him. "Doesn't matter." His smile matched the wraith's, a human picture to the monster's. "We're killing more of you every day."

The wraith's growl was heavy in the air. It did not like the warrior's words, and with vengeance on its face, it pressed its hand against Sheppard's chest, renewing the threat in all our minds. I jerked, hearing the low moan. Sheppard's head moved weakly to the side but his eyes did not open. He did not wake. Was it only from the blow the monster had delivered to him in the broken spaceflyer?

The monster had been lurking, waiting. It had surprised and caught Sheppard in the storm. But had it done any more damage when it had? Or was Sheppard's deep sleep only from the clogged chest and battered head?

"Fine!" snapped McKay.

He slumped, weariness and pain taking away the false courage he had shown before. Or maybe not false, but exaggerated. His fear for his litter mate was strong, and I could tell sky eyes was losing the war to contain it. "Stop teasing the wraith, Ronon. Just – answer the question? Why were you there? Was it to study the ions? Did you finally figure out why you couldn't get in touch with your cargo ship full of human snacks?"

My confusion grew, even while I clung to the reassurance that Sheppard's chest rose with each breath. What did McKay mean?

Were we almost to this world where they were going to set this wraith free upon?

I was lost in McKay's words, and a glance at Ronon told me at least I was not alone. But the wraith's eyes were not clouded with confusion. "We were sleeping when it went missing. When we awakened, there was a message that they needed assistance. Once we had…restocked our food stores," the smile made my skin icy, "my queen sent a scouting ship to discover what had happened. We had only begun to scan the surface when your ship arrived."

"And you weren't going to let us discover what could bring down your ships, is that right? Well too bad, because we know, and believe me, we'll be using it on every planet possible!"

Sky eyes clutched a hand on his leg, just above the wound. He was taking many breaths, his skin turning a paler shade of white than even before. He reminded me of an overexcited child, still running around the adults during fairs, even though tiredness had his eyes practically closing while he ran. That was McKay – on the edge of falling into exhausted sleep, but fighting with belligerence to stay awake, to see this out, and to not let the wraith have even one moment's peace.

But their words – what they spoke. "The ship that took my people," I began, not even sure what I hoped to say. "It did not leave my world?" Had father sky brought it down, like he had with Sheppard's ship, and the monster's? Had they lived, then, somewhere far away from where I had been?

The white haired monster just looked at me. The answer was in its eyes.

I straightened, still feeling Sheppard's weight against my side, the weapon, in the pocket. My people! "Then, they might still be alive? Maybe they survived, like you and Sheppard, sky eyes!" I had to go back…I had left them! Leom… My hands trembled in my lap.

McKay's face did not smile, he did not say, "Yes, maybe, we can look." It was Ronon, leaning against the wall, that shook his head regretfully at me. "There's nothing alive down there, except for animals. When the ion levels dropped, we got a clear scan." He did not tell me he was sorry. He did not tell me that maybe their machines were wrong. He simply told me the truth that was in his heart and mind, and knew there was nothing more to speak.

Soft words did not change it.

Hope given in a beat of my heart, and in the next, gone. I only fell inside a little, because I had known. In all the cycles I had lived alone, if any of my kind had survived, they would have tried to make the journey home. False hope was no better than lies.

"I'm sorry," sky eyes said. "As high as the ship was in the atmosphere, no one would've survived." His eyes flicked heavily to the wraith. "But at least their deaths were quick and painless."

"Would they have died in fire, then?" Like I had seen in my mind.

McKay's nod was mute.

I breathed deep, fought to hold back the cough that grew in my throat from the dank, decaying smell that clung to the wraith. It _was_ better. To die in a storm from the sky, then to be aged, held in that horrible pain from a white haired monster. I fought to keep my hand on my leg, and not rub across the mark on my chest, but the memory of the pain danced behind my eyes. It had not been long, it had not taken much, but it had been agony such that I had never felt before, not even when I brought forth Lilani from my body, alone and scared.

"We're here," called Carson.

So soon? And yet, had it not felt like forever?

The monster began to stand, began to pull Sheppard up, and my mouth spoke before my mind knew what to do. "Take me," I said hurriedly. "Leave Sheppard and take me. He is sick and injured."

"What! No!" McKay surged forward, the wound in his leg screaming at him. He fell back against the bench, clutching at his wounded limb. "Don't take anyone, we brought you here, just go…"

We both knew the wraith would drag Sheppard outside, his human shield, and we also knew Sheppard was in no condition to fight back if the monster tried anything. I searched McKay's eyes, his pinched face. He swallowed and his lips made silent words, _don't be stupid, don't miss_.

"Very well." The monster did not care what victim he held, so long as he had one.

Teyla stepped from the cockpit, Carson behind her. "You will let her go at the edge of the ramp."

Before I had time to realize what was happening, I found myself clutched against its body. It was a shock – to feel the hardness of its muscles, to feel the chest and limbs, formed so like mine, and yet, this creature was the night predator walking on two legs.

But this was what I needed – what I wanted. If I were to have a chance, I would need to be out there, with it, near enough to shoot and to not miss. I knew it would not be easy, to use this strange weapon of Sheppard's. I also knew if I was close enough, I would hit the wraith, regardless of how hard it might be.

The wraith was rock in flesh. I was dragged outside, without even a hint of effort. If it had been injured in the crash, then it had fed upon the other enough to heal its wounds. It explained why the other had been so weak, so easily overcome. I was pulled backwards, so that I could watch as Teyla and Ronon followed.

Their weapons were hidden, the monster's demand.

"She goes free, now," Ronon commanded.

The metal of the ship was no longer under our feet. The dirt of this new world was.

This was the moment. Would this monster let me go, or would it push its hand further into my old scab and steal my life? I knew, even if it did, it was worth the risk, the sacrifice. Sheppard was behind that protective wall of his people, sky eyes as well. The monster might take my life but I had no doubt it would not live much beyond that.

With surprising suddenness, the hand pulled away and I was thrust forward so hard, I stumbled and tripped, falling to my knees. Agony flared as my limbs shook from the unexpected impact. For a moment I thought the weapon would fall free from the pocket. I scrambled to my feet, biting back the pain, and clutching my hand inside the coat, as if I had hurt my chest. It had given me an excuse to reach for the weapon.

The ground was solidly under my feet, and I stood, quickly, my eyes locking with Teyla's and Ronon, before I turned to face the monster. It still looked towards the ship, waiting for us to leave. I felt the unbending metal of the weapon, secure in the pocket. Their cloth was soft against the back of my hand, like the skin of a gnarl. And yet, the gun, so solid and rough – deadly, I hoped.

The wraith was smiling, gloating. Did it really think it would get to live?

I stood at the edge of the ship, still staring. It would be easy to go back, to let Carson fly us to their city, but I hated this monster. It had used its wiles, trapped these people into bringing it here. It did not matter to me that it had not had any other choice – it was the death bringer, and it deserved to take its last breath and live no more.

Teyla would turn and leave. With a sick Sheppard and McKay, she did not argue or seek another end. Carson had wanted only to return to their city in the sea, care for their hurt friends and move forward. I could not read what lived in the warrior's eyes. I was not them. I was not free to leave my burdens and turn away from the avatar of my despair.

One freed wraith did not change their lives.

But I had ghosts and memories. They demanded of me and I listened.

"Your kind took my people from me," I said solemnly.

Once you step onto a path, you must not look back. My father had taught me those words. I had stepped onto this path the moment I took the weapon and coat from sky eyes.

I would never turn back.

Teyla tensed behind me. Ronon had never stopped tensing, he held his bones ready, poised to act -- in him, I sensed a brother. He waited, standing by Teyla. They were my cliffs. The white haired monster could not move against me as it wished. I could see it in its eyes. It wished to kill me – to take from me that which none had managed before, and knowing that emboldened me. I slid my hand further into the pocket until my fingers clasped the thick end, just as Sheppard had shown, pulling it free, but still hidden from view. I pushed the button in, safety off.

I was a fast learner.

The metal was cold promise against my skin and when I brought it out, pointed the narrow end at the wraith, it only grinned wider.

"You will not kill me human." Its black, scarred coat barely moved in the gentle breeze. The monster stood tall; confident.

My finger slipped to the trigger, and without pause, I pulled, because the monster was wrong. I would, if I could. I was willing to die trying.

When the first fire leapt from the opening of the gun, the wraith's body jerked backwards. The hit did not remove the promise of killing me from its face; it still looked as if it believed I would not take its life.

It did not know my heart.

Ronon did not interfere, but Teyla cried, "Mawani, no!"

Before she could stop me, I fired again. Two shots, three. It stood but faltered – the grin slowly fading. It tried to jump towards me but I fired again, and again, until it was down on the ground of this strange world that sky eyes' people had chosen, a world I had never been too. Here more people had died, taken by the white haired monsters. Killing this wraith would not give them their lives back, nor give me Leom, or anyone else, but it was one less monster that would haunt others.

The disbelief ruled in a face that could have been sculpted from the slick, grey-green clay I found near my cliffs. It was not the terror I had hoped to see, but it was all I had to ease the pain in my soul. It was not the arms of Leom, or the gurgles of my baby. It was not my father, or mother, or my mosul. "You are _alone_, wraith. Can you not hear the screams of the ghosts?" I was close enough now to stare down at it, to show it my anger.

"I will hear _your_ screams."

Faster than I had thought possible, the white haired monster sprung to its feet, surprising me in its resiliency. I fired, again, but this time all I heard was an empty click. I stared at the weapon, heard Teyla shouting, then a red flame erupted on the wraith's chest, sending it flying backwards. I turned, confused, to find Ronon standing tall, his dangerous looking gun pointed at the air where the wraith had been moments before.

When I tried to form words to thank him, he shrugged. "Never did plan on letting it live."

OoO

AN: I promise, only one more to go. Also, I know there are probably questions about the how's and why's of the rescue, but remember, this is Mawani's POV so not everything is going to be clear yet. I'll have more explanations revealed on the rescue next chapter.


	5. Chapter 5

AN: Yes, it's here, the END! So, big BIG thanks to my betas sholio, linzi and tazmy. I won't bore everyone with too much rambling, but it must be said that without them, this just would not have been what it is, and I am not even sure I would have gotten it written. Linzi's by far the most patient friend _ever_, for putting up with huge files appearing in her inbox some times several times a day with a pleading, "does this work?" I am a tinkering writer so things were added after my betas looked at this, all remaining mistakes are mine! Thank you so much for giving this story a chance!

**Warnings**: This chapter begins with what some might call disturbing content, a memory that is of graphic violence and mature topics. Just wanted to give a heads up.

**Chapter Five**

I had been raised by a kind mother and a gentle father – raised amongst people where violence was the rarity, not the usual. When I was a small child, so young most of my memories remained hidden, there had been a woman that committed a terrible act against her husband and her children.

The venerated and a group of elders, including my father, had found the bodies. They had gone to her home after no one had left well past breakfast, when most had begun to work the ground and the women gathered to laugh and weave cloth.

The woman had sat huddled in the corner, covered in blood. The blood of her family, father had told mother, when he had thought I was sleeping.

She had killed them while they slept.

I remember listening from my bed to the strained words spoken between my parents. Words of the woman being sick inside, that something was wrong with her mind. I remember they had kept the woman for days in her house, guarded by huntsmen, armed with their bows, arrows and knives, because she kept trying to hurt others that came near. She thought everyone meant to do her harm. She had thought her husband and children were planning to kill her, so she stole their life first.

In the end, the venerated decided the woman must be sent to the otherworld, where maybe the ghosts could heal her spirit, because there was nothing more to do for her in our world. She was a danger, like the night predators.

They talked about stories from days long gone to dust, about others who had lost their minds to madness.

I was not supposed to go near her home. I was not supposed to creep through the woods, peer in through the open door while the elders, my father, the venerated, and the village healer went in to loose her soul upon the winds.

But I was curious.

I had been dared by Leom and Kanai to look, and all I had cared about was showing Leom I was not just a stupid girl, with hair bound in leather.

They had held her arms and legs, held her body to her bed. It was stained from before, that night when she had set free the life's blood of her family, and now that same blood had aged, the red turned to an ugly, dirty brown.

The venerated pronounced the judgment – told the wild woman that the spirits might have mercy on her soul, for there was none left in the hearts of our people. They used a knife, sliced the skin on her wrist where life beats the strongest.

Her life's blood surged forth then, with strength. Throughout, the woman fought to get free, accused them of killing her. She fought until her eyes grew heavy, and her limbs grew still, and her life's blood only seeped sluggishly from the deep cut. The soft drips had spattered to the ground, drumbeats against my heart, because I watched while her soul left.

There had been so much blood. Her body's worth. Then, they had left, and put fire to the home, and after, all that remained were stones and terrible memories that haunted my father.

In the turns of day and night following, the adults had talked often and smiled less.

A handful of days later, the man that had used the knife was found in a deep water pool, a rock tied to his feet. Mother had said it was an accident, that he had been trying to weight his fish trap and became tangled, but father had said the man had not been able to live with the awful memory of what he had been asked to do – what he had done. Father said no one should have been asked to take another's life. That it was an abomination.

Was I tainted, then, if I felt no regret for taking the wraith's life? Was I wrong inside, because I had wanted to kill it?

I looked from the body, found Ronon's face again. The fierce mask slipped, revealing the warrior's pain. "They killed my people. Destroyed my world." He offered a simple explanation for the things he did. It was enough to fill my heart with sorrow and regret – for making him live again that pain.

No wonder I had felt a kinship with him – our people had suffered a similar end.

"Killing that wraith did not bring either of your worlds back," Teyla said.

Before I could seek her eyes, to see if I had angered her, she was returning to the ship, striding against the breeze that was only soft enough to ruffle my hair against my shoulders. Ronon thrust his weapon into a holder that he wore on his waist and strapped to his leg, before following her, leaving me standing on the ground, by the body of the dead wraith.

The face was forever etched in the disbelieving look and promise of death that it had thought to deliver to me, before Ronon's weapon had taken its life – and its promises -- away.

Death was forever.

I could not undo my actions, even if I wished it – and I did not.

I believed Sheppard's Teyla was a strong woman, but in this she was wrong. I had not shot that wraith only for revenge.

I would not lie; the ghosts were tumbled in with the other reasons.

I had done it for the ghosts, for the people of this now empty world, for Sheppard and sky eyes and for every life that still lived, because that one monster would not be there to steal it from them.

Still, her disapproval made my feet heavy, and I walked into the ship wishing only to have a place where I could be alone.

The irony was not lost on me. That I had been alone for so long and now craved it. But this time, I knew it would not be forever. I only needed to walk, and someone would be there.

I only wanted time to hide from my confusing feelings, to think about everything I had seen and done since my two males had changed my life. I had cared for them, protected them. I had fought with wraith and remembered my past. Now, I had killed, and I did not regret it.

But there was no joy in my heart.

I felt empty, tired.

Carson stood over Sheppard. They had stretched his long body on the bench, covered him in a blanket of silver. McKay sat across from Sheppard, his face strained and white, his eyes of blue so hollow they glowed. Teyla and Ronon were near the front, still standing, watching their healer work.

"Will he be okay?" Ronon asked.

I ducked around Carson's body and stared at Sheppard. My breath caught in my throat. His lips! They had turned the dusky color of sky when night approaches. I had seen it before in my kind, and in Lilani.

Sheppard was not getting enough air.

"Carson, he is --"

I began to explain, the worry thickening my words, when he met my eyes with sad ones of his own. Of course he knew. Carson was their healer, with magic that I could never fathom.

"I know, he's holding on, Mawani." He turned to go to the cockpit, but paused by McKay. "Keep an eye on him, I think there's blood building in his chest, but I'm going to try and get us to Atlantis. Opening him up here, when he's already sick…"

"Just go," said sky eyes. "Standing here talking is wasting time."

Carson's mouth thinned, but he nodded, and moved with more speed. It was as if _everything_ sped up. The ship responded, lifting quickly into the air, and even though the monster was gone, I still could not enjoy the moment because now I knelt by Sheppard, held his hand and kept urging him to breathe. His eyes fluttered, focused on me, then McKay. "We okay?" he asked, his voice barely a whisper of wind in the trees.

I nodded, biting my lip to keep from crying.

I did not think okay was the word, but I did not want to tell him his lips were blue, and his chest was swelling. I did not want to tell him the wraith had pushed his broken bone into his air cavity and that he was very sick. Instead, I held his cold hand, feeling both shattered and hopeful.

"Atlantis, this is Doctor Beckett – we have a medical emergency!"

The words floated to my ears and meant nothing.

Their time passed so quickly compared to my time. Before they had come, a day had stretched before me, long and slow. Now, everything moved fast, on the wings of a bird, flying from one moment to the next. The ship went through the odd ring, the Stargate, but like before, I was too worried and lost in thought to understand what was happening until it was over. It was a bite of cold, nothingness then thought returned.

I wanted to tell them to hurry, because Sheppard's pulse stuttered against my skin. His eyes blinked, closed, tried to open again, before they drifted shut for a final time and did not open again.

"Sheppard!" I rubbed his chest like I had done before and got no response. "McKay, his pulse – it is gone!" Fear gripped my soul.

"Bloody hell, Colonel!"

Someone pulled me away, though I did not let go easily. I tried to rush back to him, to urge Sheppard to breathe, but the hold was strong and I realized why – Ronon. McKay shook his head at me when I tried to shake free. The ship had stopped moving, the door opened and people rushed in. So many, many people.

There was talking to make my head ache, Carson shouting words that did not mean anything to me except for the emotion I heard in his voice. It said Sheppard's danger was great.

"We've got a hemothorax!" I watched as he pushed a strange instrument to Sheppard's chest, catching glimpses while people moved around my dark haired male. "Christ, pnuemothorax – get me a chest tube, we don't have time to wait, the pressure's stopped his heart! Carolyn, get in here and do a needle decompression while I get this blood draining --"

I tried. Father sky knows, I tried, but it had been too much. I had fought for too long. There were people gathered around sky eyes, helping him. I was standing there like a rock, pushed into the cockpit so that I was not an obstacle. Ronon blocked my way. I could not escape from this awful moment of watching Sheppard's soul leave.

The tears came, the salt on my lips.

It had all been for nothing because Sheppard had died in front of me.

My shoulders shook and I pulled free of Ronon, turned to the great ice shield, sat in the chair and wept.

OoO

"Mawani? I'm Kate – a friend of Colonel Sheppard and Rodney McKay."

I ignored the words.

I still sat, my feet on the edge of the chair, my knees pushed against my face, hiding me from their world. I hated their city. What was so great about them, if they could not even save one life?

The noise had waned behind me – had they taken Sheppard's body to prepare it for burial?

I could not bear to look, to see the hurt on sky eyes' face.

I had failed. Sheppard was dead because I had fallen asleep in their strange ship. If I had not slept, I could have stopped him from going out into the storm. He would not have been caught by the wraith, used against us, and had a stupid monster push on his broken bone, taking his life from him when his people were there to take him and sky eyes home.

"Mawani – please, let me help you."

Help?

How can you help the dead?

"My soul wants to leave," I promised, keeping my face hidden. My hair draped over the sides of my face. I could understand the pain that had driven the man to tie a rock to his foot and step into a deep pool. "I should not have lived. It should have been my heart that stilled, not Sheppard's."

Was everyone going to die and turn to dust around me? Would I always be the one that had to live with the pain of being left alone?

Soft hands touched my knees and I could sense the person moving nearer. Her voice was gentle. "Colonel Sheppard isn't dead, Mawani."

Isn't dead?

I lifted my tear-stained face, felt cool air brush against my puffy eyes. "His heart stopped," I said, afraid to believe the impossible. "Once a heart stops, it does not beat again."

She had hair the color of mine, but hers was shorter, touching just below her neck. Her smile was sad. "Not for us." She pulled her hands away and sat in the other chair. I looked around and realized that there were three other people near us – two women and a man. Two of them were dressed in the same clothes of night, with weapons hanging from their chests, like Teyla had worn. The other wore clothes I did not recognize. A coat of white and underclothes the color of the sky when sun was slipping away to rest.

She spoke again, "We have medicine to restart our hearts, and if the doctors treat what stopped it in the first place, it is common for the person to make a full recovery."

Could it be true? Did their magic go so far that it could wake the dead?

I searched her eyes and could find no lie.

She read my face like the sky. "Good, now, this is Doctor Biro, she was here helping Carson with Colonel Sheppard and stayed to make sure you were all right. She would like to take you to the infirmary and make sure you're healthy."

The woman in white smiled, but it did not make me feel warm. I looked away from her, my mouth dry. Kate had said Sheppard was alive. I did not know what this infirmary was, but if Sheppard was there, then -- "I want to see Sheppard." My knees groaned when I tried to move, stiff and painful. "And McKay."

For a moment, I was sure _no_ was on her tongue.

"Please." I remembered Sheppard's words.

"_Manners are very important to our people."_

Her eyes relented, and she stood. "But only for a moment, then, you'll let us examine you?"

I nodded, my relief replacing everything else in my heart. I would get to see them; see for myself that Sheppard lived and that sky eyes was going to be okay.

Kate's smile reached her eyes. "Good, then it's settled," she said warmly. She stood and led the way past the two people in the uniform of night sky. I followed her, staying close, letting the other woman in white leave last.

As I moved, I was surprised by how much my body hurt. My feet, my knees and arms – I had been thrown against a tree by a night predator, tossed to the ground by the wraith, but it was more than that. Aches lived in my joints and had been growing worse, all since the wraith had fed on me. I walked slowly, like the aged gnarls.

As we left the spaceflyer, I stepped for the first time into their city, and I felt my soul falter again. How many times could it do that, and still hold life? My home had been large enough for me, though not so large for Sheppard and sky eyes. They had stooped at their shoulders to not hit their heads. Now I could see why. The roof was so far above, I grew dizzy trying to look at it.

"Mawani?"

I pulled my eyes from the faraway ceiling. "It is its own world," I said, wonderingly. I could not help it. My worry for Sheppard was still great, my doubt for her words still strong in my heart – but this was a _city_.

I had lived in a village of stone houses and dirt streets before the wraith came and made it into ruins and dust, but now, I walked inside a metal city, with walls, and a roof so high I could not fathom ever touching it.

There had been stories told of cities that our people had once lived in, cities that filled the woods, but I had never seen them and had thought they were stories told to make the children laugh and wonder.

I had thought the word was not real.

My feet moved and we walked again. She told me that there were many people living in Atlantis, that some of them wanted to meet me. She told me that McKay was with Sheppard, that we would see Ronon and Teyla there as well. I felt bad, then, remembering Teyla's words to me. Her disapproval.

When the first doors opened without any touch, I stared, not sure whether to be frightened or amazed.

"It's okay – they respond to our presence."

It was not okay. I began to feel it would never be okay again.

This place was too strange. It was strong like the wind, it was the cliffs beaten and thinned into walls – it was enough to make my heart beat fast, my skin sweat and my limbs shake. As we walked, there were people everywhere. Not one, or two, or even three and four, but ten and ten more.

I had made a mistake. I should never have come, but I had not had time to consider what it meant. I had been so worried about helping my males, taking them to the place where I had found them, trying to save them from the white haired monsters while they were healing. Then we had found their broken ship and everything had fallen apart. The wraith had had Sheppard in its hands, and I had not thought beyond the moment in front of me.

She paused at another set of doors, turned to me and touched my arm gently. "Wait here for just a moment." Then she and the woman in white were gone, going through the doors. The other two that had followed us stood behind me still.

I turned to them. They were like the nole I had raised from a baby many years ago, its mother killed by a fen. It had followed me everywhere, even after I tried to get it to return to others of its kind. It had dogged my steps. I had told it, "You are useless – go find ground to dig," but in my heart, I had delighted in kneeling by its side, ruffling my hands through its soft, brown fur and feeling the rough tongue run across my skin.

I had loved it for three cycles. Then something inside had stopped working, and my nole friend had died.

One of them smiled slightly at my look, as if to say, "We're all right." But the other, the woman, looked slightly suspicious of me. As if I might do something wrong.

Kate poked her head through the door, waved at me. "Carson's ready for you."

If it had not been for the two people behind me, I might have run the other way, tried to trace my steps back to the only place in this city where I did not feel so lost and overwhelmed. Back to the spaceflyer.

Here, I was the pebble in the pond. The small, twinkling star, in a sky full of more than I could count –

"Mawani?"

I breathed deep, steadied my shaking shoulders. This was silly. Where had my courage gone? The same courage that had let me thrust a knife in a white haired monster's hand, rather than be fed upon. The same courage that had me leave the safety of my home and risk the storms to seek help for sky eyes and Sheppard. The same courage that had thrust an arrow into a wraith, and shot one with a weapon I had never used before?

First, take one step. Then, one more.

A journey of many distances begins with one single small step. And walking to Sheppard's side was not so many steps.

Stepping into Carson's home _was_ harder in many ways than anything else. It was filled with objects that made sounds and had magic lights. People moved everywhere I looked. I felt again like the small pebble, but this time I was being rolled down the riverbed.

So many sounds. So many lights.

I looked around, as nervous as a gnarl, and saw the long, high beds. Saw my two males next to each other. Sky eyes and Sheppard! Relief flooded through my bones, I felt like water freed from a flask. They were alive, they were here.

Both slept, both had tubes going from strange bags of water down to their blankets, disappearing from sight, but I could tell they went to their arms or their hands. Sheppard had one that ran underneath his blanket and came to an area slightly raised off the floor; the bag was half-full of yellow liquid. I was shocked to realize the purpose. His body's waste. They had tubes for everything!

While I had stared, the sounds around me had muffled, almost as if I were back in the storm. Then time hung – nothing else was left around me, except my two males. My feet moved me forward without thought. I did not walk to Sheppard's side, or to sky eyes'; instead, I walked until I stood between them, each to a side of me.

I touched McKay's arm, felt the reassuring warmth of his skin. Then, I rested the back of my hand against his forehead. Dry. He was still warmer than our skin should be, if we were not sick, but he rested without pain. I could see it in the edges of his eyes, and around his mouth. His face was relaxed and unburdened for the first time in many turns of night and day.

I lowered my head to his hand, thankful that his life was saved, his leg would heal. "Thank you, father sky, for this man's life."

When I pulled away, the tears had dampened my cheeks again, but this time, it was not from despair. It was because I was thankful that their people were everything McKay had said.

I gently put his hand back to his bed, turned to Sheppard. I wanted to gather his hand between mine, to feel the pulse of his life, but both hands had their strange tubes running into them. Instead, I ran my thumb along the warm skin. If he were dead, the warmth would be gone. He would be cold and empty, but staring at his face, I knew he was not empty. His soul still simmered behind his closed eyes.

My hands trembled as I ran them across his forehead. My lips had a mind of their own, and wobbled. "You died," I accused softly.

Not even a full moon cycle had passed, and yet these two males had stolen my heart. They had dropped from my sky, filled my home, and warmed my empty soul. The thought of their deaths hurt like nothing else had, since I had lost Lilani. I tried to tell myself they meant nothing. That they were the gnarl and the nole, just another creature that needed my help, but the gnarl and the nole had not held me when I cried, or told me they were sorry for my pain.

They did not look at me with eyes that spoke to my heart, saying I was more than skin and bones.

Their coming was a miracle. Their life still beating in their chest was another.

I swallowed away the thickness in my throat, curled my fingers around just one of Sheppard's, because it was not covered in tubes or wires, and held to him. I had to sniff the water from my nose, and wipe the back of my hand across my wet face, but I did it without caring.

"You and McKay are the night of a thousand miracles," I whispered.

As I stood, bent over Sheppard and holding his finger, I felt the fear begin to ebb away, like the edges of night sky when sun demands his turn. It was soft, gentle, and weariness walked in, because what body can hold so much emotion and not tire from it? I had never felt so many different feelings in such a small amount of time. I had never known so many things and been through so much, all at once.

"Mawani?"

The deafness of my focus disappeared in a rush. The beeping, talking, and movements of many returned to my ears. I knew that voice. With reluctance, I let go of Sheppard, and turned to face their healer. He had saved Sheppard, had eased sky eyes' pain and would make sure he kept his leg.

"You saved them," I said. My face crumpled again – how could it not? "Just like McKay said you would."

He smiled, but it seemed to me a ghost of what he usually wore. "Come with me, love. We need to make sure you're okay."

Maybe he was sad, too? Maybe Sheppard's heart stopping had hurt him, like it had hurt me? Maybe seeing his friends lying so damaged was a heavy weight on his soul? I walked to him, because he asked, and called me love. I had been called many things in my life. Silly, little one, rock and river, but I had never been called such a word that meant everything that was good in life. "Are they your litter mates, too?"

He took my arm, guided me to a bed on the other side of McKay. "Litter mates?" Carson patted the bed.

I sighed. Did none of their people have the word in their mind? "Brothers, or people that know the soul of one another."

"I see." Though the earlier smile had been both light and heavy, now I saw a twinkle of it in his eyes. "And – Rodney and John, they are litter mates?" He took a strange object from his pocket and held it in front of his body, waiting on my answer.

"Of course. It is as easy to see as the sun in the sky."

His amusement was strong now. "Yes, of course it is." Carson's eyes drifted over my head and I turned to see Ronon and Teyla finding chairs and settling to sit with sky eyes and Sheppard. That was good. They should not be alone in their time of healing. A broken body needs the strength of many to encourage it to heal.

They met my eyes. Ronon looked into my soul and nodded, before settling in his chair. Teyla – she smiled warmly, as if to say, "It is all right." I felt a cold spot inside me warm.

She might not have approved of what I had done, but she did not hate me. I was relieved, because this was someone that I knew Sheppard cared for, and she, in turn, cared for him. I would not want to have my actions shame him and make her think poorly of me.

When I looked back to Carson, I found him staring at me. He seemed puzzled, or unsure. Then he frowned and said, "Don't move, I'll be right back."

Don't move?

Before I could ask why, he had left, striding across the room and opening a…wall? When he had it open, it seemed to me that a shelf was built into the wall, so that it could be pushed out of sight when you did not need it. Oh, this city was going to be full of amazing things! Shelves that disappeared, beds like the one I sat on, so soft, and big! My straw beds had never been this soothing, nor long.

When he came back to me, I was proud, because I had not even moved a finger.

"Here, put these on."

Carson handed me white cloth. I stared at it dumbly. "Why would I wear a sheet?"

His forehead bunched and he took part of it away, shook it out, and I realized it was a shirt, in some ways like the black clothes McKay and Sheppard had worn. I darted a glance at them, found Ronon and Teyla watching after I had said my question too loudly. My face burned.

Sheppard and sky eyes were wearing these clothes of white.

"I am not sick, and I will not take my dress off in front of you."

This time the redness flushed across Carson's face. "Oh, no, I… uh, oh bloody…there's a curtain, Mawani, see --" He pointed to the ceiling and while I watched, he pulled the edge away from the wall and it began to unfurl, hiding me from others' sight.

So they would not be able to see me. But I still did not know the reason for changing. "Why should I wear these things?" I had only worn my dresses, my soft tunics of hide and scavenged cloth from the ruins. This one of blue had been my mothers.

"Because I need to examine you, because your dress is practically threadbare and worn to bits –"

Carson was folding his arms now, the strange object still in his hand. Had he forgotten it? I read the stubbornness on his face.

Well, I was not as easily swayed as the newly born trees. I held onto the edge of the bed and said, "I do not wish to wear these clothes. They are…"

What? Why was I being difficult?

The answer was lightning across the summer sky.

My clothes were the end of my world.

That is what it meant. This dress, it was all I had left. I sat on this bed, wearing the only thing I had from my life, and even with that, I had on sky eyes' coat. It hung past my hands and almost to my knees. If I took these things off, put on their clothes of white, I would shed the last of my world.

Carson frowned, before releasing a mouthful of air. He pulled the curtain the rest of the way, then sat on a chair that was different than the others. It was a circle of metal. "Mawani, I know this is…difficult." He searched for his words. "This --" The strange object was handed to me. I took it, feeling the suppleness of the tubes, and the coldness of the metal at the rounded end. "…is a stethoscope. With it I can listen to your heart, and your lungs." I stared at him, then the item. "Lungs?"

"I think you called them air cavities."

Lungs. Air cavities. I looked at it, ran my fingers along it. Then I raised my eyes to Carson. "But, if you lay your ear against my chest you can hear it also."

His smile returned. "Trust me on this, you can hear much more with this instrument."

Trust him.

I trusted McKay and Sheppard. I knew they trusted Carson, and their people. I looked again at this thing called a stethoscope, then the white clothes on my lap. _Courage,_ I told myself.

"I will wear your clothes," I said, resolutely.

"That's a good lass." He beamed, took the instrument, and stepped to the edge of the curtain. "I'll call to see if you're done in a few minutes."

After he was gone, I stared at the place where the hanging cloth met with the other, worried someone would come through while I was naked. Then I realized, the longer I took, the more likely it was to happen. I slipped from the bed, jarring my knees enough to cause a fresh wave of pain. Biting my lip, I shrugged free of McKay's coat, feeling oddly bereft with it gone. A fen without its nest. Then, my dress. I pulled it off, stood naked and shivered while I fought to put on their shirt and pants.

When I had managed it, I was surprised to find the clothes were comfortable. Big, but soft. The legs of these pants were folded at my ankles, but the shirt had cut sleeves so that it only touched my elbow. I turned and climbed back on the bed. Comfortable, but I had been right, it was colder.

"Are you dressed?"

Carson's call came as promised. "Yes, Carson. I am dressed."

The curtain parted and he returned. He brought with him an object full of things – I recognized the white packets and syringes. Carson followed my gaze and set it behind me on the bed, so close I could smell his scent. He smelled like my other males, but there was another smell on him that I could not place. It was tangy, bold, like spice, but subtle on my tongue and in my nose. I smelled again, deeper.

He pulled away, bemused. "What? Do I need a shower?"

Shower? The word was another to find a picture for, but I shook my head at his intent. "You smell good. Like, the best flowers growing in the warmest days…" How did I explain that all I had smelt for too long was gilly, laviola, fevers, and fear?

His smile was warm, but it did not last. "What happened to your world?" he asked with sympathetic eyes. "To your people, and how did you happen to find Rodney and John?"

How to tell my story?

I had given what I knew to my males, not long after I had found them, when the memories had begun to return, along with the terrible ache it caused in my heart. I knew salt gathered in my eyes again. He touched my knee and I looked into his eyes. Their healer had a gentle soul. "The wraith came," I said, my words only shaking a little. "Many cycles ago." I held up my hands and showed him ten and two. "It was my binding day." His eyes of blue faded and Leom stood in front of me. I took his hand from my knee and held on. "I was hidden in a chest – I was my people's hope, my father, he was the sun king and I was his princess moon. They would have died for me." Leom's face melted away and I stared at Carson. "They did die for me, and I became princess of the dust."

His eyes hurt for me. He did not speak and I was glad. Words did not belong with the dead.

I pushed away the pain, again, and vowed to find a way to let it rest forever with the ghosts. "On a day when the snows came, I was walking in my woods. I heard a cry and ran. I found sky eyes and dark haired Sheppard lying in a gnarl's den, a gift from father sky. They were very sick at first, but they began to heal. They warned me about the wraith that had fallen from the sky with them, and told me of their city in the sea, and their healer. Their friends and how you would come for them."

"We tried to come sooner."

He was carrying his own hurt and guilt.

"Why did you not?"

Carson pulled a syringe free from the odd basket. "One of our people, his name is Radek, found information on the planet just as our rescue team was leaving. There are things in your sky that affects our machines. He was working to find a way around that, but then they found mention of a natural pattern to the…"

I remembered sky eyes' words when we had sat in the ship. "Ions?"

His eyes crinkled, pleased with me. I smiled a little in return.

"Yes, ions. We left, but it'd already been a week." He held up five fingers then two. "For another four days we flew high above your world, measuring the ions, waiting. The level began to fall but it was still too high." He pulled an odd cloth of wilted sun from the basket and gave it to me. "This is a type of rubber, I tie it around your arm and it makes your blood push stronger to get around it. I need to take a sample of your blood, to check you for any parasites or diseases, do you understand?"

I nodded, wanting him to continue telling me of how they came to rescue sky eyes and Sheppard. I wanted to think _rescue us_, but I knew they had come for their people, not me. I was a surprise, yet, they had taken me nonetheless. Would they have argued against it if the wraith had not taken Sheppard?

He tied the band around my arm, just above the elbow. It was tight, then he tapped the thin skin and looked me in my eyes. "Hold still, you'll feel a wee pinch."

I watched, fascinated. He wiped my skin with the smelly cloth then took the needle and began to push it into my arm. It did pinch, and if he had not warned me, I would have pulled away, but I remembered. I did not move.

My blood rushed into the tube. It was amazing, like so much of everything around me.

Then, he was pulling the tube away and pushing a small white ball against my skin. "Hold this for a moment."

"How did you come to find sky eyes?" I asked, holding it like I was told.

He put the tube in the basket and smiled reassuringly. "We got the emergency transmission. Ronon wanted to go right away, but Teyla was worried we'd crash. So," he pulled another item from the basket, "we called Atlantis and sent our latest scans to Radek. He came back and told us his models projected it'd most likely be safe. We have machines to show us how to get to our kind." He grimaced at the memory. "Imagine our surprise to find the life signs scattered. Four, though we didn't know at the time that one was a wraith. As soon as we landed, we went to the nearest life sign, which turned out to be Rodney in the crashed Jumper.

If he hadn't been in such terrible shape, we would've gone after you and Sheppard together, using our machine to guide us – he told us that there was a wraith out there somewhere. With only three unidentified life signs, and all spread out, Teyla and Ronon left to search for you and Sheppard, ready to take down the wraith if they found it first. They knew approximately where to look. I had to stay and help Rodney." A broad smile crinkled his eyes. "If you ever need a laugh, ask me to tell you how Rodney described you to us."

I wanted to smile with him, but my mind had already leapt to another thought, and it was not one that made me feel like smiling. If they had found Sheppard, would they have left? Left me in the cold, where I would have been gutted by a night predator, or lived, only to return to an empty spaceflyer? Would I have lingered for days and nights, waiting for them to return?

No, I would not have lingered. The wraith would have found me, even if the night predator had not.

"But they found me first…"

"Aye," Carson breathed. "While they were gone, the wraith arrived, threatened to feed on Sheppard if we didn't let him in. I had the machine that told me the bloody thing had someone, though I didn't know for sure it was Sheppard until we saw him. After we did, the wraith needed Rodney to fix the ship, me to keep Rodney alive, but he didn't need Sheppard. I can fly the ships, as well as Rodney. That's when you three arrived, just in time."

If his hand had not trembled just then, I would not have known how scary it had been for him.

The monster had used Sheppard to get in the ship and then had been about to take his life. My empty feeling over killing the monster filled with newfound belief that I had acted rightly. It had not cared to go against its vow. It would have killed my Sheppard, and only fortune -- their luck -- had saved Sheppard's life. That we had arrived at the moment we did.

The wraith had not had the same luck, and that was as good of a sign as any from father sky that it had not deserved to live. How could it?

If I had vowed to let it free, and killed it, my soul would have been sullied. No better than the monster. But I had not. I had not said, "I will set you free."

Neither had Ronon.

"It was not me that saved Sheppard," I said.

These words left me tired, again, more drained than I thought a body could be. Reliving memories was hard on the soul, especially when the memories were such as these. They left marks inside that were slow to heal. "Teyla and Ronon saved my life. It was they that led us back in time to save him."

My vision grew blurry.

I fisted my hands, letting go of the white cloth ball, and tried to gain some semblance of control. Had coming to this place reduced me to a child, not able to keep my emotions steady for more than a moment of time? I grew angry. "Finish," I said, and though I meant for it to be strong, and forceful, it was weak, and pleading.

His hand found my leg. The warmth bled through the cloth and I shut my eyes, forcing the pain to just stay away. To leave me alone, for one breath of time. Was it so much to ask for?

"Here, listen." He put the instrument in my ears, held the small circular part against my chest.

_Thump-thump. Thump-thump_.

I opened my eyes. My heart! The beat…the pulse of life! It was as if my ears were inside my skin and touching my heart.

His head leaned near mine and he spoke, his beautiful voice one I was coming to care for, "I know you've had it hard, love, but you're safe here, and we've got many things to show you. What you went through is over. The colonel and Rodney would not be alive if it weren't for you, and don't think for a moment I'll ever forget that."

I was surprised to see that he was crying.

They were silent tears, but one tried to be heard, hovering at the edge of his eye. I reached for it, to touch his sorrow. My father had said when we hold the pain of others, we learn to let our own go free.

I touched Carson's pain, and I let go of mine.

OoO

This city was like my world.

There was a night and a day.

I still wore the white clothes, but I was in my room, a place Kate had brought me to and said, "You can stay here for as long as you like."

It was big, but not bigger than my home, though the roof was higher. The walls were straight, not curved, and I missed the soft green glow. A window let in the darkness of night, lights came from the wall, rising to fill the room. She had shown me a place to relieve my body of its waste, to bathe, and I had been embarrassed to ask, "How do I use these things?"

After she had shown me, she stood by the door, ready to leave.

"McKay mentioned a place where Teyla's people lived." I brought it up because I did not want to stay where I was not welcome, though I longed to stay here, and learn the ways of healing and the machines Carson used.

She smiled kindly and nodded. "The mainland, yes. Do you wish to go there?"

I lifted my chin. _Courage_. "No," I admitted. "I wish to stay here, on the city in the sea, and learn the ways of healing."

I could tell I had surprised Kate, but then her smile deepened. "I think Carson would like that."

She left then, telling me if I needed anything, to stop anyone in the hallway and ask for them to call her. She said for a few days, there would be someone outside my door, to be a guide and help me get where I needed to go. In the morning, Carson wished to see me. To go over the results of my exam, though I was not sure what he thought to find. He had given me small things he called pain pills for the aches in my knees and arms, elbows and wrists. It seemed everywhere ached.

Carson had let Kate bring me to my room when he was finished.

At first, he had thought to keep me in the bed I had sat on through his tests, but I had openly pleaded then, to be taken to a place where I could sleep without so many people moving around. I had felt open and exposed in Carson's busy home.

He had given me reasons why he wanted me to stay. I had been through a lot. He was worried about how I was adjusting to the changes.

Now, alone, I turned in a circle, staring at all of it. The walls, the bed, the shelves hidden in the walls, and a thing Kate had called a desk and a lamp. It was beautiful, in a way that was so very different from the cliffs, rivers and trees. I wanted to touch it all, but I did not.

I went to the smaller room, took a shower and watched my waste be whisked away with a touch of my finger. I picked up the object she had called a toothbrush, stared at my face in a thing she called a mirror. I had seen myself before, reflected back from the still waters, but it was nothing like this picture.

This was my image, unblurred, clear. My hair hung around my face, still wet from my shower. I had dried with a towel – cloth so thick and soft I had thought about keeping it around me all night.

I had always used a thin scrap of cloth or gnarl hide to scrub my teeth. Polishing each one took time. Now, I tasted the strong flavor of the paste she told me to use, scrubbed and thought how easy it was to do it this way.

I began to long for the day when this all would be as natural to me as the sun rising in the sky.

The white clothes were on the floor where I had discarded them, and I pulled them on, the smell of my skin making me smile more. Their soap was sweetened like the flowers and sunshine. It smelled of summer days and nights. I sniffed my arm, amazed at how soft it had made my skin.

They had given me a meal to eat before bringing me here, but now my stomach growled at me, angry because I had been too entranced with their forks of metal, and trays made out of a substance they called plastic, to bother eating much.

Is this what my people might have become, had we not been destroyed by the wraith?

I sat, and thought, and knew it would not have been for many, many cycles, and not in the days and nights of my life.

I tried to sleep then. I pulled the blankets up around me, shrugged my body until I was buried and embraced by the softness and warmth. But my mind would not stop. It would not slow down and rest.

I thought about what I had seen walking through the halls to get to my room. The walls with bubbling water glowing green in tubes, and for a moment, I had to touch it, to see if it were the clay from my cliffs, but it was not. It was glass, Kate said. And light.

We had walked past doors where a glinting of sun on water had caught my eye. I had ignored Kate, and our tag-along nole, and gone through those doors, stepped out onto the water. Stepped out into the sky on the ground.

It was the largest bend in the river, over and over again. I could see no trees, no rocks, and for a moment, panic rushed in at me. Then Kate was there, touching my shoulder and telling me, "It's safe. The city has survived for a very long time."

I thought about the person sky eyes had said was their leader – knew that it was similar to the venerated, and also, the role my father as sun king had held. There had been no leader on my tongue, but the venerated had advised. My father and our family had been looked upon as avatars of our people's fortune. We were responsible for the rain, the sun, and the moon and stars.

Their leader, this Elizabeth, had stopped by while Carson was still talking to me. She had a soft smile, thanked me for caring for Rodney and John – for saving them, and I had seen her affection for them shining through. Then, she had left, to stand by their beds with the others, while my two males had kept sleeping, deep, and if it were not for the beeps that Carson had said reported the beats of their heart, I would have grown afraid they were not living.

Was Sheppard still sleeping?

Sky eyes?

Did they know where I was?

Did they care?

Or would I be forgotten now. Useless, because they were back among their people.

I did not believe it of them, and threw the thought to the wind. Still, I could not sleep. My legs were restless, and I tossed the blankets away, stood, and found the feet coverings they called socks in one of the many shelves in the wall, pulling them on and savoring the feel of cloth against my rough skin.

I pushed on the wall where Kate had shown me, watched as the door opened. A man was there, just as she had said would be. He turned and looked at me, curious. "What can I do for you, uh, Mawani?" he asked. He seemed kind in his face and he held out his hand. "Major Lorne, I'm relieving Lieutenant Cadman so she can get some dinner."

"Major Lorne." I tested the name on my tongue, stared blankly at his hand. There were so many customs and unlike my people, they had different words to call each other. I now knew that Sheppard was John, Colonel, _and_ Sheppard. Sky eyes was Mckay, Rodney and also Doctor. So many names for one body.

I took his hand, clasped it for a moment between mine and then let it go. "I would like to see Sheppard and McKay."

His eyebrows raised. "The infirmary?" He considered it then shrugged. "Not sure I'd willingly go there, but, come on."

He gestured with his head to walk with him, and I followed. We went through another of the scary rooms they called a transporter –to be moved from one place to another without taking any steps at all, it was amazing and frightening! Then down a hall, until I recognized the familiar doors. My heart sped up. Were they awake? Would they be happy to see me?

He stepped to the side and nodded, "Go on. I'll stay here."

I hesitated but his smile flashed, encouraging me. I remembered my earlier steps, and followed them, surprised that the lights were dimmed, the room quiet and subdued. It was so different at night than it was during the day. The hanging cloth partially obscured the room – the place where Sheppard and McKay were.

Before I could move closer, I heard their voices, whispered and low.

"Carson said this time he almost didn't get you back."

It sounded like an accusation, like what I had said only slightly differently to Sheppard not long ago. And like my words, sky eyes' held only his turmoil.

"Yeah, well, he did."

My feet stilled. There was something…some emotion hanging in the air, and it told me that this was not for me to hear, not for anyone else. It was like the nights in my home when one of them had soothed the other, and I had pretended to sleep. It was not for me. I should not be here, but I could not get my feet to turn, to walk away…

Sky eyes' laugh was harsh. "Oh, right, so the fact that he pulled off another last minute miracle is supposed to make me feel better?"

"No, the fact that I'm still talking to you is." Sheppard's words were lazy, but affection crept underneath. He coughed, harsh and painful. I watched the shadow of sky eyes struggling to Sheppard's side, hopping awkwardly, before getting close. McKay lifted Sheppard's back and supported his litter mate through his effort to draw breath.

When it passed, McKay eased him to the bed and stood over Sheppard. "We got lucky, Colonel. Do you know how long I'll be on crutches for?"

His words were meant to be grumpy and demanding, but I heard what was inside them. I heard the fear. The pain. Sky eyes did not often speak what was in his heart.

I watched as Sheppard's hand lifted, clasped McKay's wrist. "Long enough to drive me crazy," he rasped.

There might be many that did not hear what sky eyes meant, but Sheppard did. He was sky eyes' litter mate. Truly.

"You know, there's still the matter of you giving me that antibiotic shot --"

"Almost died."

I could hear Sheppard's crooked smile as he asked, "You're not going to use that every time we disagree, are you?"

Sky eyes hopped backwards, his shadowed outline lowering into the chair. "Every. Time," he promised. "There are no statute of limitations for near death experiences and stubborn colonels."

They needed this time.

I turned, my feet finally moving without sound on the floor. Sheppard and McKay would be here tomorrow. I would speak to them then, tell them about the things I had seen, and how amazing their city was. Tell them thank you, because they had given me a life from ruins.

"Mawani --"

I startled, and turned. The curtain had only been partially closed, and I had stepped far enough to the center of the room that sky eyes could see me. I felt my face grow hot. I had not meant to overhear their words.

"I wanted to see if you were well." Did it matter, to explain why, when I had still been here during a moment that had not been meant for my ears?

"No, no," Sheppard said. "It's okay." He waved a hand at me, still full of tubes. "Come here."

Even with Sheppard calling, I almost left, but then I remembered the days and nights of feeding them, bathing their fevered and flushed skin. Remembered sky eyes holding me when I had cried after escaping the wraith, and Sheppard touching my wrinkled skin near my eyes and whispering, "I'm sorry."

They meant more to me than I could say, and I could not walk away.

I smiled wistfully, feeling awkward now. "Your people came."

Sky eyes snorted. "Took them long enough. Still, a rescue is better than no rescue at all."

"I told you they would." Sheppard's bed was raised so that he was leaning upwards. If I had not seen Carson do it earlier, it would have been yet one more thing to wonder about. He waved at a chair near sky eyes. "Sit, you're making my neck hurt."

"You lie," I poked, because I was not so tall that he had to crane his neck to see me. I was shorter than most of their people. Still, I sat, pulling my feet up against my chest.

"So, is Atlantis proving to be all that we said it was?" sky eyes asked, his fingers moving on the chair frame. His question came out like any other…how is your day, how do you feel, is that more white grain weed (with a hidden groan)…but now there were undercurrents, the kind I found in deeper waters. His eyes held a sparkle, a vulnerability, while he waited to hear what I thought of _his_ city.

I rested my chin on my knees and grinned like I was ten cycles old and sharing a secret with Kanai and Leom. "It is the moon in the sky, the stars, and the storms, McKay …it is the wind in the trees and the water rushing down the river."

It was amazing.

He beamed, pointed a hand at Sheppard then to me. "See, Sheppard, she has taste."

Sheppard's mouth twitched. "Of course she does, she saved my life." His eyes of many colors sparkled in the dim light, his soul shining through.

"My life too!" blustered McKay. "In fact, if I remember correctly, she rescued _me_ first."

Sheppard's eyebrow rose and he grinned like an irreverent boy. I read the mischievousness in his face. "Brains before beauty, McKay."

"You just insulted yourself!" declared sky eyes. "You called yourself stupid."

Sheppard's eyes met mine as he kept smiling. "No, Rodney, just admitting that …in some things…you're smarter than I am."

"Well, of course I am. I'm smarter than everyone else on Atlantis, although Radek's probably closest and technically, Carter, when she's here, but note…" He lifted an important finger. "Still not smarter, just close."

This was what I had needed.

What had brought me here tonight. To hear their familiar words, and listen to their voices as they teased one another. This was what had touched my soul in ways that their machines never could.

For all the amazing things in their city, this was what mattered the most.

"Ow, son of a bitch --"

Sheppard's hand cradled his chest and I saw sky eyes shift forward, concern sliding to replace his faked irritation. "What…what'd you do?"

"Nothing," rasped Sheppard. "Just…crap … tried to sit straighter."

"Well, why were you doing that! Carson said to stay still…"

The panicked murmurs of sky eyes alternated with the grouchy, "Quit hovering, McKay, you're worse than Beckett."

They began to speak of things that I did not know about, times before I had known them. Their words had no meaning to me, other than knowing my litter mates had escaped their adventure without damage to their souls. It had been what I had hoped for, what I had begun to believe would never happen at the lowest moments.

When I had struggled in the storm, sure that Sheppard had died in the snow. When I had opened sky eyes' wound and tried to fight the sickness in his leg. When I had thrust the arrow in the wraith and gathered food for them to eat. When I had bathed their fevered bodies and dribbled laviola between their lips. When I had heard McKay's cry and found them lying in the grass, injured and senseless.

They were still the sun and the moon. They were still smiles and irritation, hot words without any fire. They had remained who they had always been, even though they had endured much pain and hardship.

They were whole in their hearts and minds.

It was _amazing_.

**Epilogue – one week later**

I stood in the ruins of my people.

This was the resting place of their bones. While I had huddled in fear in the wooden chest, they had burned in this place, with no one but father sky to hear their cries.

Did it matter?

Did not hearing change their deaths? Did it erase the twelve cycles I had lived alone?

Wind blew my pale hair away from my face, and I looked upon the ghosts. I heard their whispers, felt their touch. My pain had been strong, but I had _lived_. I was not a ghost, and I did not belong to the dust.

They stood behind me, Sheppard pale still, McKay balanced precariously on his wooden sticks. I had told them I would go alone, that it was enough for them to bring me near in the spaceflyer I was coming to know as puddle jumper, but they had surprised me.

"Getting the chance to see just how much damage – it would be scientifically…useful."

"And those storms – might need someone like me, good at navigating…"

McKay had snorted and Sheppard had cuffed him on the back of his head and muttered, "At least I didn't say it was 'scientifically useful' to look at the mass graveyard.'"

I had laughed, full of affection for these two males that had swooped so unexpectedly into my life, and changed its course. My loneliness was not so easily shaken off, but it could at least be set aside, hung on a hook, while I wore a new cloak of joy. Sheppard and sky eyes' people were kind, and generous. I had a place to sleep with a bed so soft it made my bones weep. Carson had said I had a disease called arthritis – though the image I saw in the mirror was not so old, the wraith took life in unpredictable ways, explained Carson. He had seemed truly upset, but I had touched his hand with mine, and told him, "Sore bones are a small thing for what I have gained."

He was beginning to teach me his ways of healing. I learned their words, touched their machines, and I imagined a bird in flight could not feel as light and free as I did then.

No – these ruins did not change anything. But, it let me finally put to rest the ghosts.

I knelt in the snow. The pants I wore now were warm and kept my legs from growing numb. The cloth would grow wet if I stayed like this for long, but I was not going to. Slipping my hands free from the soft mittens they had given me, I dug until I could touch the ashes. A small container was in my pocket, and I pulled it out, unscrewing the top, just as Teyla had shown me. Carefully, I held my fisted hand of ashes over the opening and let the dust trickle into the bottle.

I pushed to my feet, the container clutched tightly in my hand. With my other, I brushed the clinging snow from my legs. This was what I had come for, and now I had to tell them I was leaving, that I would never be back. Ghosts and dust are poor company, I knew.

I told the ruins, "I left the time of the moon and walked like a ghost in the time of maybe." The dust was cold, like the dead, but this place was not empty. "I leave now to walk with the sun." My words caught in my throat, and I struggled to hold my shoulders straight, and finish what was in my heart and on my tongue. "Do not forget me," I said raggedly, then added, "_Please_," because it felt as right as the sun on my face.

If I tasted salt, what creature could fault me?

I tried to steal the image into my mind, to remember it for always, even as I whispered to them – to my father and mother, my friends, that I had laughed and cried with, and to Leom, whom I had loved with the purity of innocence. "I will never forget you," I promised. "Not even when the sky dims in my eyes."

A rustling sound came from behind and when I looked back, I saw my two males, trying to act as if they were not here and had not witnessed my pain. They had done it before and I did not blame them. This was not theirs to share.

Sheppard's eyes rose to the sky when another gust rattled his weapon against his chest. A storm was moving near, ready to reclaim these ruins. It had only been the magic of their machines that had found it.

"We should," Sheppard thumbed awkwardly towards the waiting ship, "probably go."

"Yes, hopefully _before_ we become permanent fixtures of the second ice age," agreed McKay vehemently, briskly clapping his hands.

I smiled tremulously, and nodded. "Yes, we should."

And I delighted in saying **_we_**.

The End.


End file.
